John  Kirk  Semple 


LIFE   AND    LETTERS 

Essays  by  J.  C.  SQUIRE 


By  the  Same  Author 


VERSE 
POEMS.     First  Series 

THE    BIRDS   AND    OTHER   POEMS 

THE  MOON:  A  Poem 

THE    SURVIVAL    OP    THE    FITTEST 

PARODIES 

IMAGINARY    SPEECHES 
STEPS   TO    PARNASSUS 
TRICKS   OP   THE   TRADE 

PROSE 

THE  GOLD  TREE 
BOOKS  IN  GENERAL. 

By  Solomon  Eagle 

BOOKS    IN    GENERAL.       Second 

By  Solomon  Eagle 


THE    COLLECTED   POEMS   OP   JAMES   ELROY 

FLECKER.    Edited  with  an  Introduction 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Essays  by 
J.   C.   SQUIRE 


NEW       YORK 
GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT,   1921, 
BY  GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES  OP  AMERICA 


TO 
EDWARD   SHANKS 


NOTE 

The  contents  of  this  volume  are  a  selection  from 
articles  published  weekly  in  Land  and  Water 
since  early  in  1917.  J.  C.  S. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

CHILDHOOD  IN  RETROSPECT        ...       13 

KEATS'S  FAME 20 

SHORT  CUTS  TO  HELICON  ....       29 

EDWARD  THOMAS         <       .       .       .       .       36 

THE  WALLET  OF  KAI-LUNG     .       .       .       44 
ONE         .        .        .  ...       .       52 

ANATOLE  FRANCE         ...       .       .       58 

NATURAL  WRITING       .        .       .       .       .       66 

SECRET  HISTORY .74 

MR.  ASQUITH  AS  AUTHOR  ....       85 

THE  INFINITIVES  THAT  WERE  SPLIT       .       93 
DR.  JOHNSON        .       .  .•  .     .       .     100 

A  PUZZLE     .        .       .       .....       .     107 

TOM  THUMB         .       ...       .       .114 

SIDELIGHTS  ON  THE  VICTORIANS        .       .     121 
SIR  CHARLES  DILKE    .        .        .       .  129 

THE  UTOPIAN  SATIRIST      ....     137 

JANE  AUSTEN'S  CENTENARY      .       .       .145 
MR.  CONRAD'S  MASTERPIECE       .       .       .     153 

rii 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

FOUR  PAPERS  ON  SHAKESPEARE        .       .  161 

I.  SHAKESPEARE'S  WORKMANSHIP    .  161 

II.  THE  BLACKAMOOR  ....  168 

III.  HAMLET 175 

IV.  SHAKESPEARE'S  SONNETS         .       .182 
THE  GREAT  UNFINISHED    .       .        .       .189 

WALT  WHITMAN 196 

ROHMER         .        ...        .        .       .  203 

POPE 210 

GOD  SAVE  THE  KING 217 

MIDSHIPMAN  EASY 224 

JANE  CAVE 232 

GALLERIES 239 

INITIALS 247 

RECITATION  IN  PUBLIC       ....  254 

HUMANE  EDUCATION 261 

A  SUBJECT 269 

GOAKS  AND  HUMOUR 276 

A  CORNER  OF  OLD  ENGLAND    .       .       .  292 

A  POET'S  PEDIGREE 300 

RABELAIS 307 

FAME  AFTER  DEATH  .               .  315 


mi 


LIFE  AND   LETTERS 


CHILDHOOD  IN  RETROSPECT 

MR.  W.  H.  HUDSON  is  known  to  many 
— though  not  to  as  many  as  he  should  be — 
as  one  of  the  closest  and  most  affectionate 
living  students  of  birds  and  beasts,  and  at 
the  same  time  as  the  possessor  of  a  simple  and  ex- 
cellent English  style.  A  Shepherd's  Life  and 
the  studies  of  wild  life  at  the  Land's  End  and 
in  La  Plata  have  frequently  been  described  as 
the  nearest  things  we  have  to  the  work  of  Richard 
Jeff  cries,  and  the  description  is  justified.  Mr. 
Hudson  has  now,  in  a  book  boldly  entitled  Far 
Away  and  Long  Ago,  written  a  history  of  his 
early  years.  A  succession  of  old  scenes  came 
back  to  him  very  clearly  during  a  convalescence, 
and  he  wrote  them  down  while  they  were  fresh. 
He  has  made  with  them  his  best  book. 

For  a  book  of  the  kind,  it  is  very  diversified. 
The  tone  is  not  varied,  the  writing  glides  smoothly 
on,  and  the  details,  whatever  their  nature,  are 
harmonized  and  made  coherent  by  that  golden  at- 
mosphere, that  even  transparent  glaze  rather, 
that  gives  kinship  to  all  things  remembered  from 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

childhood.  But  in  its  material  surroundings  his 
was  no  ordinary  English  childhood,  and  he  was 
not  an  ordinary  child.  He  was  born,  in  the 
middle  of  the  last  century,  on  the  pampas,  where 
his  amiable  and  cultivated  parents  raised  sheep 
amidst  very  rough  surroundings.  The  young 
republic  was  dominated  by  the  Dictator  Rosas, 
"  the  Nero  of  South  America  "  ;  the  Hudsons' 
servants  and  the  most  of  their  neighbours  were 
wild  gauchos,  reckless  and  cruel,  whose  festive 
evenings  commonly  ended  in  fights  with  knives. 
At  an  early  age  he  saw  a  beaten  army  straggle 
past  his  house  and  murder  was  a  word  soon 
familiar  to  him.  He  gives  many  sketches  of 
the  men  and  women  of  that  day,  some  of  them 
noble,  others  utterly  vile,  but  all  picturesque  in 
raiment  and  individual  in  action ;  and  the  strange- 
ness of  the  natives  is  heightened  by  their  con- 
trast with  the  few  early  English  or  Scotch  set- 
tlers still  clinging  to  their  native  conventions. 
Into  that  strange  community,  living  in  low  estan- 
cias  scattered  over  the  almost  treeless  plain  still 
full  of  birds  and  beasts,  strange  vagrants  wan- 
dered, always  on  horseback.  One  was  an  Eng- 
lish schoolmaster  who  would  stay  at  a  place  for 
months,  then  lose  his  temper  and  his  job,  mount 
his  horse,  and  head  for  the  horizon.  Another 
was  the  most  remarkable  beggar  in  literature: 

[14] 


CHILDHOOD  IN  RETROSPECT 

"  He  wore  a  pair  of  gigantic  shoes,  about  a 
foot  broad  at  the  toes,  made  out  of  thick  cowhide, 
with  the  hair  on ;  and  on  his  head  was  a  tall  rim- 
less cowhide  hat  shaped  like  an  inverted  flower- 
pot. His  bodily  covering  was,  however,  the  most 
extraordinary:  the  outer  garment,  if  garment 
it  can  be  called,  resembled  a  very  large 
mattress  in  size  and  shape,  with  the  ticking  of 
innumerable  pieces  of  raw  hide  sewn  together. 
It  was  about  a  foot  in  thickness  and  stuffed 
with  sticks,  stones,  hard  lumps  of  clay,  rams' 
horns,  bleached  bones,  and  other  hard,  heavy 
objects;  it  was  fastened  round  him  with  straps 
of  hide,  and  reached  nearly  to  the  ground." 

This  freak  does  not  seem  so  singular  in  his  sur- 
roundings as  out  of  them.  And  there  are  many 
others,  including  a  lady  who,  when  St.  Antony 
did  not  send  her  fine  weather,  let  his  image  down 
a  well  to  discover  how  he  liked  the  wet.  They 
pass  over  the  pages  in  sequence,  come  and  go; 
none  stay  but  the  family,  who  linger  in  the  back- 
ground, a  dim  but  friendly  group. 

Mr.  Hudson's  passion  for  nature,  nourished 
by  his  mother,  developed  early.  The  naturalist 
who  was  to  spend  years  watching  English  rooks 
and  starlings,  began  by  staring  in  fascination 
at  scissor-tail  tyrant-birds,  ostriches  and  flam- 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

ingoes.  At  an  age  when  his  literary  contem- 
poraries were,  at  most,  ferreting  for  rabbits,  he 
was  trying  to  catch  an  armadillo  by  the  tail — 
the  beast,  which  escaped  by  burrowing,  threaten- 
ing to  drag  him  into  an  early  tomb  if  he  did  not 
let  go.  He  has  none  of  those  astounding  stories 
with  which  he  has  sometimes  tested  one's  capac- 
ity for  belief — such  as  that,  told  five  or  six 
years  ago,  about  the  swan  which  was  in  love 
with  a  trout,  followed  it  daily  all  over  the  lake, 
and  finally  attacked  the  angler  who  caught  it. 
But  he  saw  a  dog  which  dived  and  caught  fish; 
and  he  came  upon  two  deer,  a  ring  of  does 
around  them,  fighting  with  horns  which  locked, 
and  never  unlocked  when  they  died.  He  would 
lie  awake  in  the  darkness  listening  to  the  snakes 
sliding  and  whispering  under  the  floor:  snakes 
fascinated  him,  with  their  menacing  move- 
ments and  their  rich  lines.  There  were  green 
and  grey  snakes,  green  and  velvet-black  snakes, 
snakes  with  bellies  barred  bright  blue  and  crim- 
son; and  he  found,  and  several  times  tracked 
down,  an  unknown  velvet-black  snake,  six  feet 
long,  which  once  drew  its  heavy  length  right 
over  his  foot  as  he  stood  looking  into  a  tree. 
But  it  is  of  the  birds  and  the  flowers,  and  the 
few  and  precious  groves  of  trees,  that  he  writes 
most.  Of  birds,  he  must  mention  hundreds; 
[16] 


CHILDHOOD  IN  RETROSPECT 

and  the  most  beautiful  of  all,  he  says,  were  the 
flamingoes.  He  describes,  with  emotion  but 
without  laboured  effort,  how,  as  a  child  of  six, 
he  walked  over  a  league  of  meadow,  and  came 
suddenly  to  a  wide  water  where  multitudes  of 
birds — wild  duck,  swans,  ibises,  herons,  and 
spoonbills — waded  or  swam ;  and  nearest  "  three 
immensely  tall  white  and  rose-coloured  birds, 
wading  solemnly  in  a  row  a  yard  or  so  apart 
from  one  another  .  .  .  My  delight  was  in- 
tensified when  the  leading  bird  stood  still  and, 
raising  his  head  and  long  neck  aloft,  opened 
and  shook  his  wings.  For  the  wings,  when 
open,  were  of  a  glorious  crimson  colour,  and 
the  bird  was  to  me  the  most  angel-like  creature 
on  earth."  He  describes  later  sights  of  flam- 
ingoes, standing  reflected  in  a  still  river  at  sun- 
set, flying  low  over  blue  water  in  a  long  crim- 
son line;  but  the  most  beautiful  picture  he 
paints  is  not  here,  but  is  to  be  found  in  a  dec- 
orative effect  which,  in  its  way,  not  all  nature 
could  excel.  There  was  an  orchard  of  great 
old  peach-trees,  with  black  trunks,  standing  on 
a  carpet  of  grass,  covered  with  mounds  of  rosy- 
pink  blossoms.  In  these  trees  thousands  of  little 
yellow  birds  often  sat  and  sang;  and  one  day 
a  flock  of  small  parrakeets  came  and  sat 
on  the  twigs,  amid  the  blossom.  Such  a 

[17] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

picture  is  fragrant  in  the  memory  for  a  lifetime. 
The  setting  of  Mr.  Hudson's  tale  is  exotic; 
yet  the  history  is  familiar;  for,  where  obstinate 
calamities  have  been  avoided,  it  is  only  in  ines- 
sentials that  men's  early  memories  differ.  The 
country  of  which  Mr.  Hudson  writes  is  not 
Argentina;  it  is  the  country  of  childhood,  a 
farther  and  more  beautiful  place;  and  there  all 
men  have  lived,  though  not  in  all  men  are  its 
impressions  equally  deep  or  its  influences 
equally  living,  and  few  make  a  habit  of  revisit- 
ing it  in  imagination.  A  village  street,  a 
church,  elms,  farmyards  and  great  hollow 
barns,  a  blacksmith's  forge,  meadows  with  cows, 
a  reedy  stream;  a  fishing-harbour,  where  nets 
are  dried  on  the  hill  and  the  gulls  forage  the 
mud  for  offal  at  low  tide;  a  rusty  industrial 
suburb,  builders'  yards,  geraniums,  a  black 
canal,  and  green  and  red  signals  in  the  night: 
they  are  all  the  substantial  provinces  of  that 
unsubstantial  land;  the  air  of  them,  the  speech, 
the  manners,  are  the  same.  There  were  birds, 
animals,  bearded  old  men,  and  a  slight  reticent 
little  girl  with  pale  complexion  and  flying  hair. 
Aksakoff  on  the  steppes  beyond  the  Volga, 
Goethe  remembering  the  gabled  streets  and 
berobed  councillors  of  Imperial  Frankfort, 
they  are  looking  back  on  the  same  world:  a 
[18] 


CHILDHOOD  IN  RETROSPECT 

world  extraordinarily  vivid  and  picturesque, 
where  the  strong  were  more  strong,  the  sweet 
more  angelic,  the  quaint  more  odd;  where  the 
young  newcomer  first  learned  to  know  in 
others  brutality  and  love,  in  himself  curiosity 
and  silence,  fear,  cunning,  sympathy,  ambition, 
courage,  and  cowardice,  the  desire  and  dread  of 
danger,  resentment,  fierce  grief,  and  despair; 
where  scents  were  acute  to  the  nostrils,  where 
bright  colours  were  first  seen,  and  the  wonders 
of  the  elements  first  learned,  the  sun,  the  moon, 
clouds,  sky,  and  stars,  trees,  flowers  and  water 
in  its  various  forms,  the  wide  whiteness  of 
snow,  the  terror  of  thunder  at  night,  the  steely 
persistence  of  heavy  rains.  Time  was  long 
there,  before  we  bothered  to  count  or  needed 
to  use  the  minutes,  and  under  the  shadow  of 
powerful  authority  we  enjoyed  a  liberty  like  no 
other  liberty;  new  things  came  unendingly  and 
adventure  was  all  around.  We  did  not  know 
then  that  we  lived  there,  and  our  elders  usually 
forgot  it;  but  we  know  thirty  years  afterwards. 
The  knowledge  makes  the  contemplative  sort  of 
artist,  in  whom  the  mood  of  retrospection  often 
becomes  dominant,  desire  to  set  it  down  before 
he  dies  and  one  reporter  has  been  lost.  From 
this  cause  many  beautiful  books  have  come;  and 
the  book  that  has  not  yet  been  written  will  be 
the  loveliest  and  saddest  in  the  world. 

[19] 


KEATS'S  FAME 

A  HUNDRED  years  ago  Keats's  first  volume 
of  poetry  was  published;  and  Sir  Sidney 
Colvin's  new  Life,  which,  humanly  speaking, 
must  be  the  definitive  biography  of  the  poet,  is 
a  "  centenary  tribute  "  which  renders  any  other 
unnecessary.  That  first  volume,  which  ap- 
peared when  Keats  was  twenty-one,  contained, 
as  every  critic  has  observed,  much  immature 
and  much  bad  work.  Lines  like 

Of  him  whose  name  to  ev'ry  heart's  a  solace 
High-minded  and  unbending  William  Wallace. 

which  Sir  Sidney  Colvin  does  not  quote,  beat 
on  their  own  ground  Leigh  Hunt's 

The  two  divinest  things  the  world  has  got 
A  lovely  woman  in  a  rural  spot, 

which  he  does  quote.  But  when  everything 
possible  has  been  extracted  to  illustrate  the 
tremendous  progress  Keats  made  in  two  years, 
the  fact  remains  that  there  were  scattered 
everywhere  in  the  book,  passages  which  might 
[20] 


KEATS'S  FAME 

have  shown  any  one  but  a  dolt  that  this  was  a 
great  poet  in  the  making,  and  that  it  contained, 
moreover,  To  One  who  has  been  long  in  city 
pent;  Sleep  and  Poetry,  and,  above  all,  the 
Sonnet  on  Chapman's  Homer. 

The  reception  that  it  got  is  notorious.  "  The 
book,"  says  Cowden  Clarke,  "might  have 
emerged  in  Timbuctoo  with  far  stronger  chance 
of  fame  and  appreciation.  The  whole  commun- 
ity, as  if  by  compact,  seemed  determined  to 
know  nothing  about  it."  This  is  a  slight  exag- 
geration. There  was  a  little  sale;  and  this  is 
how  the  publisher  alludes  to  it: 

"  By  far  the  greater  number  of  persons  who 
have  purchased  it  from  us  have  found  fault 
with  it  in  such  plain  terms,  that  we  have  in 
many  cases  offered  to  take  it  back  rather  than 
be  annoyed  with  the  ridicule  which  has,  time 
after  time,  been  showered  upon  it.  In  fact, 
it  was  only  on  Saturday  last  that  we  were 
under  the  mortification  of  having  our  own 
opinion  of  its  merits  flatly  contradicted  by  a 
gentleman,  who  told  us  he  considered  it  '  no 
better  than  a  take-in.' ' 

The  critics,  however,  said  little  about  it  (except 
that  Keats  was  unclean) ;  their  efforts  were 
reserved  for  Endymion,  which  came  out  next 

[21] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

year.  With  this  the  friends  of  "  that  amiable 
but  infatuated  young  bardling,  Mister  John 
Keats,"  could  no  longer  complain  that  he  was 
entirely  ignored.  Blackwood  led  the  pack,  the 
Quarterly  and  the  British  Critic  following. 
Here  is  Blackwood's  peroration: 

"  And  now,  good  morrow  to  the  *  Muses'  son 
of  Promise ' ;  as  for  the  feats  he  yet  '  may  do/ 
as  we  do  not  pretend  to  say  like  himself, 
'  Muse  of  my  native  land  am  I  inspired,'  we 
shall  adhere  to  the  safe  old  rule  of  pauca  verba. 
We  venture  to  make  one  small  prophecy,  that 
his  bookseller  will  not  a  second  time  venture 
£50  upon  anything  he  can  write.  It  is  a  better 
and  a  wiser  thing  to  be  a  starved  apothecary 
than  a  starved  poet;  so  back  to  the  shop,  Mr. 
John,  back  to  *  plasters,  pills,  and  ointment 
boxes,'  etc.  But,  for  Heaven's  sake,  young 
Sangrado,  be  a  little  more  sparing  of  extenu- 
atives  and  soporifics  in  your  practice  than  you 
have  been  in  your  poetry." 

This  passage  is  well  known.  What  is  not  so 
generally  realized  is  the  slowness  with  which  the 
appreciation  of  him  spread  even  after  his  death. 
He  had  died,  and  Shelley's  great  elegy  on  him 
was  under  review,  when  Blackwood  resumed 
with  a  reference  to  him  as 

[22] 


KEATS'S  FAME 

"  a  young  man  who  had  left  a  decent  calling 
for  the  melancholy  trade  of  Cockney-poetry 
and  has  lately  died  of  a  consumption  after  hav- 
ing written  two  or  three  little  books  of  verse 
much  neglected  by  the  public." 

A  comic  analysis  of  Adonais,  with  parodies  on 
it,  followed.  A  few  men  knew  what  Keats  was ; 
Lamb,  Shelley,  Leigh  Hunt  and  Keats's  young 
friends.  Reynolds,  in  a  later  letter,  said :  *'  He 
had  the  greatest  power  of  poetry  in  him,  of 
anyone  since  Shakespeare."  Eight  years  after 
his  death  a  group  of  young  Cambridge  men, 
including  Tennyson,  Fitzgerald,  Sterling, 
Arthur  Hallam,  and  Monckton  Milnes — 
Browning,  as  a  boy,  had  already  been  inspired 
by  him — were  the  first  group  of  enthusiasts  who 
had  not  known  him  in  the  flesh.  But  the  pun- 
dits still  remained  secure  in  their  crassness.  It 
was  in  1832  that  the  Quarterly,  reviewing 
Tennyson's  poems,  wrote  of  him  as 

"  a  new  prodigy  of  genius — another  and 
brighter  star  of  a  galaxy,  or  milky  way  of  poetry, 
of  which  the  lamented  Keats  was  the  har- 
binger." 

Jeers  at  Keats's  failure  with  the  public  were 
still  well  founded  in  fact.  Keats  had  been  dead 

[23] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

nineteen  years  when  the  first  reprint  of  his 
collected  poems  appeared;  and  this  went  into 
remainders  with  Browning's  Bells  and  Pome- 
granates. Four  years  after  this  Lord  Jeffrey, 
still  flourishing,  observed  that  Keats  and 
Shelley  were  falling  into  oblivion,  and  that  of 
the  poets  of  their  age,  Campbell  and  Rogers 
were  those  destined  for  immortality.  Lord 
Houghton's  edition  of  1848  marks  the  date  of 
the  general  recognition  of  Keats  as  one  of  the 
greatest  of  our  poets.  The  maintenance  and 
increase  of  his  fame  since  then  cannot  be 
described  in  detail.  "  Keats,"  said  Tennyson, 
"  would  have  become  one  of  the  very  greatest 
of  all  poets  had  he  lived.  At  the  time  of  his 
death  there  was  apparently  no  sign  of  exhaus- 
tion or  having  written  himself  out;  his  keen 
poetical  instinct  was  in  full  process  of  develop- 
ment at  the  time.  Each  new  effort  was  a 
steady  advance  on  that  which  had  gone  before. 
With  all  Shelley's  splendid  imagery  and  colour, 
I  find  a  sort  of  tenuity  in  his  poetry."  Again, 
"  Keats,  with  his  high  spiritual  vision,  would 
have  been,  if  he  had  lived,  the  greatest  of  us." 
And  the  noblest  tribute  of  all  is  the  Essay  by 
the  present  Poet  Laureate,  indisputably  the 
finest  thing  that  has  been  written  about  him, 
and  one  of  the  most  penetrating,  direct  and 

[24] 


KEATS'S  FAME 

— there  is  no  other  word — business-like  critical 
studies  in  existence.  "  If,"  concludes  that 

essay, 

"if  I  have  read  him  rightly,  he  would  be 
pleased,  could  he  see  it,  at  the  universal  recog- 
nition of  his  genius,  and  the  utter  rout  of  its 
traducers;  but  much  more  moved,  stirred  he 
would  be  to  the  depth  of  his  great  nature  to 
know  that  he  was  understood,  and  that  for  the 
nobility  of  his  character  his  name  was  loved  and 
esteemed." 

And  the  words  are  all  the  more  impressive  as 
they  end  a  study  which  is  utterly  unsparing 
in  its  detection  and  analysis  of  Keats's  faults. 

"  High  spiritual  vision,"  "  the  nobility  of 
his  character " ;  the  phrases  will  still  sound 
strange  to  those  who  take  their  conception  of 
Keats  from  erroneous  but  hard-dying  legend. 
He  died  of  consumption;  he  wrote,  when 
dying,  love-letters  which  in  places  are  morbid, 
though  they  are  not,  as  a  whole,  so  "  deplor- 
able "  as  is  usually  made  out ;  and  Byron  gave 
universal  currency  to  the  delusion  that  he  was 
killed  by  hostile  criticism.  This  combination 
of  facts  has  perpetuated  the  notion  that  he  was 
a  neurotic  weakling  with  a  hectic  genius. 
It  is  all  hopelessly  wrong.  Those  who  knew 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

him  thought  him  the  manliest  of  men.  Anec- 
dotes like  that  of  his  hour's  successful  fight 
with  a  butcher  twice  his  size  whom  he  had 
caught  ill-treating  a  cat,  are  unnecessary  as 
corroboration ;  for  corroboration  is  present 
everywhere  in  his  letters,  and  frequently  in  his 
poems.  A  man  who  was  killed  by  scurrilous 
blockheads  of  reviewers  would  be  a  weakling. 
But — except  for  the  fact  that  attacks  on  him 
made  it  impossible  to  earn  money  by  his 
poetry — he  was  indifferent  to  what  was  said 
about  him.  Every  great  poet  knows  his  own 
capabilities;  and  Keats's  opinion  of  those 
who  were  vilifying  him  was  briefly  expressed: 
"  This  is  a  mere  matter  of  the  moment ;  I  think 
I  shall  be  among  the  English  Poets  after  my 
death."  He  was  not  over  confident.  He 
discriminated  between  his  good  and  his  bad 
work:  "My  ideas  with  respect  to  it"  (that 
is,  Endymiori)t  he  said,  "are  very  low"; 
and  a  little  later,  "  I  am  three  and  twenty, 
with  little  knowledge,  and  middling  intellect. 
It  is  true  that  in  the  height  of  enthusiasm  I 
have  been  cheated  into  some  fine  passages;  but 
that  is  not  the  thing."  But  the  only  thing  he 
was  uncertain  about  was  whether  he  had  done 
anything  good  enough  to  show  what  was  in 
him: 

[26] 


KEATS'S  FAME 

"  If  I  should  die,  said  I  to  myself,  I  have  left 
no  immortal  work  behind  me — nothing  to  make 
my  friends  proud  of  my  memory — but  I  have 
loved  the  principle  of  beauty  in  all  things,  and 
if  I  had  time  I  would  have  made  myself 
remembered." 

Of  that  he  was  never  doubtful.  And  he  knew 
accurately  the  conflicting  but  not  irreconcilable 
tendencies  within  himself;  the  tendency  to 
luxuriate  and  the  tendency  to  "  philosophise." 
At  the  beginning  the  former  predominated.  He 
wandered,  often  led  by  the  rhyme,  through 
mazes  of  soft  and  luscious  imagery;  he  held 
that  the  greatest  poet  was  he  who  said  the 
most  "heart-easing"  things;  and  the  list  of 
his  favourite  adjectives,  compiled  by  Mr. 
Bridges,  illustrates  very  strikingly  the  lan- 
guorous quality  of  his  dreams  and  desires. 
But  he  was  not  made  to  be  a  slave  to  these: 
in  the  Odes  and  Hyperion,  the  richness  and 
vividness  and  sweetness  remained,  but  the 
tropical  luxuriance  had  been  pruned,  and  the 
native  strength  of  his  character  and  intellect, 
the  clarity  of  his  imagination,  the  absolute 
accuracy  of  phraseology  of  which  he  was 
capable,  appear  with  a  splendour  that  makes 
these  poems  incomparable  with  everything 

[27] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

else  in  our  literature  but  the  greatest  passages 
of  Shakespeare  and  Milton.  "  I  think,"  he  said, 
"  poetry  should  surprise  by  a  fine  excess,  and 
not  by  singularity;  it  should  strike  the  reader 
as  a  wording  of  his  own  highest  thoughts,  and 
appear  almost  a  remembrance." 

I  have  not  quoted  Keats;  I  have  barely 
referred  to  a  few  of  his  poems;  I  have  made 
no  attempt  to  discover  the  secret  of  his  great- 
ness or  expose  the  beauties  of  his  art.  In  a 
space  like  this,  one  is  forced  to  fasten  on  one 
or  two  details  only  when  dealing  with  so 
great  a  writer  as  Keats  and  so  solid  a 
biography  as  Sir  Sidney  Colvin's.  The 
structure  and  peculiar  merits  of  Sir  Sidney's 
volume  one  must  also  ignore.  But  all  the 
material  one  could  ask  for  is  here;  the  poet's 
art  and  thought  are  very  fully  illustrated  from 
his  own  words;  there  are  several  important 
additions  to  our  knowledge  of  him;  and  the 
long  critical  chapters,  especially  those  on 
Endymion  and  Isabella,  are  as  exhaustive  and 
sensible  as  they  are  unaffected. 


[28] 


SHORT  CUTS  TO  HELICON 

I  OPENED  the  Times  Literary  Supplement, 
and  my  eye  was  detained  by  an  advertisement 
which  for  ten  minutes  made  me  oblivious 
to  everything  else  in  the  number  from 
"Dramatic  Poetry"  to  "God  and  the  Abso- 
lute." It  was  one  of  those  rare  advertisements 
which  induce  a  train  of  thought. 

And  this  was  it.  An  institution  called  the 
London  Correspondence  College  was  inviting 
the  Supplement's  readers  to  learn  how  to 
write  verse.  "  The  field  for  Verse,"  ran  the 
invitation, 

"  is  much  larger  than  most  people  suppose. 
Hundreds  of  journals  publish  and  pay  for 
poetry.  Anyone  with  aptitude  can  learn  to 
write  the  kind  of  Verse  editors  will  pay  for, 
by  availing  themselves  of  the  excellent  course 
of  Instruction  provided  by  ...  The  train- 
ing is  individual  and  progressive;  technique  is 
simply  explained,  and  any  natural  ability 
the  student  may  have  is  developed  to  the  full 

[29] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

through   his   or   her   own   work   in   connection 
with  the  lessons.     The  fee  is  quite  moderate." 

It  was  bound  to  come,  and  here  it  is. 

I  should  greatly  like  to  know — but  I  suppose 
that  I  could  not  find  out  without  paying 
money,  which  I  am  reluctant  to  do — what  are 
the  suggestions,  what  the  training,  given  to 
those  who  serve  with  the  College  their  appren- 
ticeship to  the  Muse.  But  I  do  not  know,  and 
I  dare  not  guess,  as  secrets  beyond  my 
conjecture  and  stunts  beyond  my  devisal  may 
have  been  hit  upon  by  the  Professors  of  the 
College,  and  I  should  not  like  even  to 
appear  to  misrepresent  the  nature,  or  the 
benefits,  of  their  teaching.  I  may,  however, 
without  speculating  as  to  what  is  their  practice, 
be  allowed  to  reflect  on  what  would  be  my  own 
should  I  ever  find  myself  in  control  of  an 
Academy  of  Shorthand,  Typewriting,  and 
Commercial  Poetry. 

Were  this  country  America,  or  did  the 
present  American  fashion  for  free  verse  spread 
here,  the  problem  would  be  comparatively 
uncomplicated.  '  Technique  "  could  certainly 
be  simply  explained,  as  both  rhyme  and 
regular  rhythm  are  foregone,  the  poet  can 
indefinitely  vary  his  lines,  and,  for  the  content, 

[30] 


SHORT  CUTS  TO  HELICON 

all  that  is  necessary  is  a  catalogue  of  objects 
seen,  heard,  and  smelt  by  the  writer  at  any 
particular  moment  or  series  of  moments. 
Here,  dealing  with  the  novice,  one  would 
instruct  him  on  his  morning  walks  to  make  a 
careful  note  of  the  objects  he  saw,  and  recapitu- 
late their  leading  characteristics  when  he  got 
home;  then,  killing  with  one  stone  the  two 
birds  of  memory-training  and  art,  he  would 
catalogue  any  sequence  of  them.  For  instance: 
"  misty  air,  a  long  straight  street  of  flat  houses, 
a  solitary  policeman  in  a  shiny  cape,  a  red 
pillar-box,  a  boy  in  the  distance,  whistling  a 
tune."  The  next  stage  in  the  process  would 
be  to  write  these  things  down  in  irregular 
lines,  the  shorter  the  better,  made  up  according 
to  the  author's  taste  or  caprice.  The  last  and 
finishing  process  consists  of  the  judicious, 
or  even  the  quite  casual,  interspersal  of  dots, 
and  the  addition  of  some  single  line  of  reflec- 
tion, or  exclamation  which  supplies  the  neces- 
sary touch  of  emotion.  It  would  not  be  safe 
to  leave  the  student  to  his  own  devices  at  the 
start;  he  could  quite  safely  be  given  a  little 
list  of  last  lines  which  could  be  used  (prefer- 
ably in  italics)  in  any  poem  of  the  kind.  "  Oh, 
God!  .  .  ."  is  one;  "Ah!  the  pain,"  is 
another.  Behold  the  final  result: 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Misty  air  .   .   . 

A  long,  straight  street 

Of  flat  houses  .    .   . 

A  solitary  policeman 

With  a  shiny 

Cape   .    .    . 

A  red  pillar-box  .    .    . 

A  boy 

In  the  distance 

Whistling  a  tune. 

Ah,  God!  the  pain. 

That,  though  I  may  not  be  able  to  persuade 
English  readers  that  this  is  so,  is  the  sort  of 
'  Verse "  that  in  America  "  editors  will  pay 
for,"  and  there  is  no  reason  why  its  construc- 
tion should  not  be  quite  successfully  taught 
by  post.  But  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic  things 
are  a  little  more  difficult. 

In  England  "  Hundreds  of  journals  publish 
and  pay  for  poetry,"  but  almost  all  of  them 
insist  upon  rhyme,  and  upon  lines  of  equal,  or 
regularly  varying  length.  Moreover,  there  is 
a  good  deal  of  difference  between  the  sort  of 
subjects  and  styles  demanded  by  various 
papers.  I  should,  therefore,  when  framing 
my  course  for  students,  begin  by  telling  them 
to  study  (as  every  successful  business  man  is 
bound  to  do)  the  market,  and  the  classes  of 
goods  most  in  demand  by  the  various  groups 

[32] 


SHORT  CUTS  TO  HELICON 

of  consumers.  Let  the  student  note  (a) 
the  commonest  subject,  (b)  the  commonest 
rhymes,  (c)  the  commonest  words,  in  the  poems 
published  by  those  papers  which  he  decides 
to  exploit.  After  a  little  labour  he  will  be 
able  to  sort  the  papers  into  three  or  four  main 
categories.  He  will  then  decide  either  to 
produce  several  types  of  goods  for  the  several 
types  of  customer,  or  to  concentrate  on  the 
largest  available  market  for  a  single  type, 
thereby  giving  himself  a  chance  of  perfecting 
his  processes,  and,  by  virtue  of  the  advantages 
inherent  in  repetitive  work,  securing  maximum 
output  and  reducing  overhead  charges  (in 
which  I  include  the  purchase  of  magazines  to 
see  if  they  have  printed  anything  yet)  to  a 
minimum.  Let  us  suppose  he  decides  to  adopt 
the  latter,  and  most  efficient,  course. 

In  accordance  with  the  instructions  I  have 
given  him,  he  has  found  that  the  subjects 
most  in  demand  in  his  group  of  consumers 
are  (say)  love,  flowers,  joy  coming  after  sorrow, 
sunset,  and  maternal  affection.  The  statistical 
tables  drawn  up  after  examination  of  a 
thousand  specimen  poems  have  revealed  that 
the  separate  words  (excluding,  of  course, 
articles  and  conjunctions)  most  frequently 
required  are  "  moon,"  "  roses,"  "  twilight," 

[33] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

"  slumber,"  "  lullaby,"  "  you,"  "  blackbird," 
"  J°y»"  "  sorrow,"  and  "  to-morrow  " — the  last 
two,  for  obvious  reasons,  being  bracketed  equal. 
Amongst  the  most  frequent  of  the  other  rhymes 
are  found  "  moon  "  and  "  June,"  "  you  "  and 
"blue,"  "heart"  and  "apart,"  "love"  and 
"above,"  "stars"  and  "bars,"  "sun"  and 
"  done."  Now,  whatever  liberties  may  be  taken 
by  the  advanced  student  ripe  for  original  ex- 
periment and  research,  I  should  always  advise 
the  beginner  who  means  to  play  for  safety  and 
avoid  the  risk  of  disappointment  to  keep  as 
closely  to  the  beaten  path  as  possible.  He  may 
or  may  not  save  himself  trouble  by  sticking 
boldly,  whenever  he  writes,  to  the  metre  and 
rhymes  of  a  particular  poem  in  his  card-index 
file.  If  he  prefers  to  be  original  he  should  at 
least  always  choose  metres  and  rhymes  which  he 
knows,  from  his  tables,  to  be  always  popular.  Let 
us  say  that  he  decides  on  a  poem  about  love  of 
eight  lines,  in  two  four-line  stanzas.  For  this, 
if  every  line  (and  editors  greatly  like  that)  is 
to  have  a  rhyme,  four  sets  of  two  rhymes  are 
necessary.  How  should  he  next  proceed? 
How  select  his  rhymes? 

To  assist  him  here  I  should  provide  him 
with  a  little  catechism  for  each  class  of  subject. 
He  can  get  right  there  with  a  few  standard 

[34] 


SHORT  CUTS  TO  HELICON 

questions  such  as:  (1)  Is  it  to  be  a  happy 
poem?  and  (2)  What  time  of  day  is  it  (the  love, 
or  the  meditation  on  flowers,  or  the  maternal 
affection)  to  take  place?  These  questions  give 
a  principle  of  selection;  for  instance,  in  a  poem 
about  the  day,  the  sun  will  properly  appear;  in 
one  about  the  night  moon  or  stars  may  be  intro- 
duced. Our  poet  has  finally  decided  on  love, 
and  on  the  rhymes  "  love "  and  "  above," 
"  moon  "  and  "  June,"  "  flowers  "  and  "  hours," 
"  blue  "  and  "  you."  Now  it  is  clear  that  he  can 
make  the  lines  scan  by  counting  the  syllables; 
but  where  I  am  in  difficulties  about  assisting  him 
is  in  regard  to  the  manner  in  which  he  shall  fill 
the  lines  up.  It  is  no  good  telling  him  to  make 
them  as  like  his  models  as  possible :  he  could  guess 
that  much  for  himself.  But  suppose  he  gets  as 
far  as  this: 

[It  is  a  perfect  night  in]  June, 

[No  breezes  shake  the]  flowers, 
[The  golden  radiance  of  the]  moon 

[Doth  gild  the  slumbering]   hours. 

[I  wait  beneath  your  casement,]   love, 
[  1   blue, 

[  ]  above, 

[The  moon,  the  rose,  and]  you, 

and  cannot  fill  up  the  gaps?  I  honestly  do 
not  know  what  advice  to  give. 

[35] 


EDWARD  THOMAS 

EDWARD  THOMAS,  who  was  killed  in  France 
in  1917,  at  the  age  of  thirty -nine,  wrote  a  large 
number  of  prose  books.  Even  when  forced  to 
produce  books  for  money  he  wrote  with  distinc- 
tion and  thought  for  himself;  and  the  best  of 
his  English  travel  books  are  the  work  of  a 
man  saturated  with  every  aspect  of  the  country. 
For  nearly  twenty  years  he  wrote  no  verse, 
but  in  1913  he  began  writing  poetry  profusely. 
Only  a  few  of  his  friends  knew  that  "  Edward 
Eastaway,"  who  appeared  in  an  anthology  in 
1917,  was  he.  He  was  very  shy  about  his 
verse  and  had  prepared  for  publication  a 
volume  over  the  same  pseudonym.  His  poems 
have  now  appeared  with  his  real  name  on  them. 
They  make  beyond  comparison  his  best  book; 
and  there  have  been  few  books  so  good  in  our 
time. 

Thomas  was  a  tall,  quiet,  reserved  man  with 
melancholy  eyes  and  strong  hands,  browner 
than  those  of  professional  writers  usually 
are.  His  poems  are  like  him,  they  are  personal 

[36] 


EDWARD  THOMAS 

in  spirit  and  substance;  they  have  his  quiet- 
ness, his  sadness  and  his  strength.  When 
there  is  profound  emotion  behind  them  it  is 
characteristically  expressed  in  few  words  and 
a  slight  troubled  movement  of  the  verse.  The 
language  is  simple  and  direct,  with  few  made 
phrases,  inversions  or  fine  adjectives;  it 
moves  slowly  and  reflectively,  attuned  to  his 
prevailing  mood,  which  might  be  called  a 
mood  of  resignation  if  that  word  did  not  seem 
to  preclude  the  inexhaustible  freshness  of  his 
response  to  the  beauty  of  earth,  "  lovelier  than 
any  mysteries."  He  felt  always  the  pain  of 
death,  and  change,  but  that  never  clouded 
his  faculty  for  enjoying  things;  in  his  ecstasy 
over  the  endless  miracles  of  the  earth  he  was 
sobered  by  his  knowledge  of  their  transience, 
but  he  was  not  one  of  those  dismal  people 
to  whom  every  ephemeral  thing  is  first  and 
foremost  an  illustration  of  the  power  of  the 
abstractions  death  and  change.  He  loved 
things  for  themselves  and  thought  of  their 
beauty  more  than  of  their  brevity. 

His  poems  are  poems  of  the  earth  and  of 
one  man  who  looked  at  it,  not  knowing  how 
long  he  would  be  able  to.  It  is  a  lonely  man  who 
wanders  through  the  book;  when  he  speaks  of 
other  people  they  are  memories  or  else  faintly 

[37] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

and  remotely  in  the  background.  His  human 
relations  here  are,  we  feel,  subsidiary  to,  less 
intense  and  passionate  than,  his  relations  with 
nature.  He  is  primarily  a  nature  poet,  and 
a  peculiar  and  interesting  one.  The  "  land- 
scape "  of  no  English  poet  has  been  more 
normally  English  than  his,  and  few  have 
covered  such  a  range.  Most  landscape  poetry 
deals  with  certain  special  kinds  of  times  and 
places,  dawn,  twilight  or  sunset,  mountains, 
bleak  moorlands,  ripe  cornfields,  seas  very 
rough  or  very  blue,  summer  more  than  winter, 
willows  more  than  oaks,  strong  sunlight  or 
strong  moonlight  more  than  the  diffused 
light  of  an  ordinary  overclouded  day.  This  is 
easily  explicable.  Scenes  very  definitely 
coloured,  forms  obviously  decorative,  seasons 
which  make  a  violent  appeal  to  our  senses, 
shapes  and  shades  by  their  nature  and  by 
tradition  indissolubly  associated  with  our  uni- 
versal elementary  thoughts  and  states  of 
feeling,  will  inevitably  be  those  most  commonly 
recalled  and  described.  Moreover,  many 
writers  have  their  own  dominant  and  habitual 
preferences  from  amongst  these;  the  exhilar- 
ating dawns  of  Wordsworth,  the  bright,  still 
sunshine  of  Keats,  the  large  moons  and  lament- 
ing beaches  of  Tennyson  come  automatically 

[38] 


EDWARD  THOMAS 

into  the  mind  with  the  mention  of  their  names. 
Edward  Thomas  was  unusual  in  avoiding  the 
usual.  Not  only  did  he  not  go  to  nature 
mostly  for  decoration  or  for  a  material  setting 
for  his  moods,  but  he  did  not  select,  uncon- 
sciously or  deliberately,  his  subjects.  Except 
that  he  avoided  large  towns  and  the  conven- 
tionally romantic,  one  may  fairly  say  that  he 
was  liable  to  write  a  poem  about  anything 
one  might  see  at  any  time  of  day  in  a  walk 
across  the  South  of  England.  He  was  not 
haunted  by  the  rare  unusual  things,  the  one 
glorious  night  of  a  year,  the  perfect  twilight 
on  a  lake,  the  remembered  sunset  over  the 
marshes,  which  will  haunt  most  of  us.  He 
was  moved  by  and  wrote  about  the  things  we 
pass  daily  and  could  look  at  properly  if  we 
cared  to;  he  was  like  one  of  those  simple  and 
charming  water-colour  painters  who  will  sit 
down  in  front  of  anything,  any  ditch,  haystack, 
or  five-barred  gate,  and  get  the  essential 
into  a  sketch.  White  winter  sunlight;  rain 
on  wild  parsley;  hawthorn  hanging  over  a 
reedy  pond  with  a  moorhen  swimming  across  it; 
spring  snow  and  rooks  in  the  bare  trees; 
a  gamekeeper's  gibbet;  the  head-brass  of  a 
ploughman's  team;  peewits  at  nightfall;  hounds 
streaming  over  a  hedge;  a  February  day,  thin 

[39] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

sunlight  on  frozen  mud  and  three  cart-horses 
looking  over  a  gate;  old  labourers  going  home 
— these  are  the  things  he  wrote  about,  and 
many  such  trifles  many  times  repeated  are  the 
English  countryside  as  it  is  and  as  it  has 
been.  His  earth  is  not  merely  something  brown 
that  goes  with  the  blue  at  one  particular 
moment  or  is  dark  against  the  sunset  at 
another;  it  is  earth,  now  dusty,  now  wet  and 
clogged,  which  is  ploughed  and  takes  its  seed 
and  brings  forth  corn  in  due  season.  He  is  as 
close  to  it  at  one  time  as  at  another;  the  depths 
of  his  heart  can  be  sounded  by  the  dint  of  a 
hobnail  on  a  path's  mud;  and  he  wants  no 
flamboyant  sunsets  who  can  find  all  the  beauty 
and  mystery  of  colour  in  the  curling  white  and 
gold  and  purple  fronds  of  a  pile  of  swedes. 

Any  of  these  poems  might  be  quoted;  I 
will  take  as  an  example  one  of  the  least 
conspicuous,  a  poem  less  musical  than  many 
of  them  and  only  indirectly  revealing  his 
temperament,  one  that  illustrates  scarcely 
any  of  his  qualities  save  the  closeness  of  his 
obeservation  and  the  use  he  made  of  the 
ordinary.  It  is  The  Path: 

Running  along  a  bank,  a  parapet 
That  saves  from  the  precipitous  wood  below 
The  level  road,  there  is  a  path.     It  serves 
Children  for  looking  down  the  long  smooth  steep, 

[40] 


EDWARD  THOMAS 

Between  the  legs  of  beech  and  yew,  to  where 

A  fallen  tree  checks  the  sight;  while  men  and  women 

Content  themselves  with  the  road  and  what  they  see, 

Over  the  bank,  and  what  the  children  tell. 

The  path,  winding  like  silver,  trickles  on, 

Bordered  and  even  invaded  by  thinnest  moss 

That  tries  to  cover  roots  and  crumbling  chalk 

With  gold,  olive  and  emerald,  but  in  vain. 

The  children  wear  it.     They  have  flattened  the  bank 

On  top,  and  silvered  it  between  the  moss 

With  the  current  of  their  feet,  year  after  year. 

But  the  road  is  houseless,  and  leads  not  to  school, 

To  see  a  child  is  rare  there,  and  the  eye 

Has  but  the  road,  the  wood  that  overhangs 

And  undergrows  it,  and  the  path  that  looks 

As  if  it  led  to  some  legendary 

Or  fancied  place  where  men  have  wished  to  go 

And  stay ;  till  sudden,  it  ends  where  the  wood  ends. 

This  wood  is  anywhere  and  everywhere;  we 
see  it  continually  and  take  no  notice  of  it; 
but  I  think  that  this  poem  would  mean  more 
than  most  to  an  exile  in  Rhodesia  or  the 
Soudan.  You  get  another  completely  common- 
place scene — the  country  station — in  Adle- 
strop! 

Yes.     I  remember  Adlestrop — 

The  name,  because  one  afternoon 

Of  heat  the  express-train  drew  up  there 

Unwontedly.     It  was  late  June. 

The  steam  hissed.    Someone  cleared  his  throat, 

No  one  left  and  no  one  came 

On  the  bare  platform.     What  I  saw 

Was  Adlestrop — only  the  name. 

[41] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

And  willows,  willow-herb  and  grass, 
And  meadows  sweet  and  haycocks  dry, 
No  whit  less  still  and  lonely  fair 
Than  the  high  cloudlets  in  the  sky. 

And  for  that  minute  a  blackbird  sang 
Close  by,  and  round  him,  mistier, 
Farther  and  farther,  all  the  birds, 
Of  Oxfordshire  and  Gloucestershire. 

And  almost  more  typical  still  is  Tall  Nettles: 
the  corner  in  a  farmyard,  with  a  rusty  harrow 
and  a  stone  roller  overgrown  by  nettles  covered 
with  dust,  except  after  a  shower. 

Where,  here  and  there,  the  poet  is  more 
intimate  and  gives  direct  expression  to  his 
feelings,  he  uniformly  reaches  his  highest 
level  of  poetry.  The  best,  The  Bridge  and 
Lights  Out,  would  be  ruined  by  quotation; 
there  are  others,  such  as  Aspens,  where,  stand- 
ing at  crossroads,  outside  a  smithy,  an  inn 
and  a  shop,  he  listens  to  the  trees  talking  of 
rain,  and  gives  the  last  word  on  his  prevalent 
mood: 

Whatever  wind  blows,  while  they  and  I  have  leaves 
We  cannot  other  than  an  aspen  be 
That  ceaselessly,  unreasonably  grieves, 
Or  so  men  think  who  like  a  different  tree. 

There  are  one  or  two  poems  which  touch  on 
the  war;  the  war  as  a  distant  and  invisible 

[42] 


EDWARD  THOMAS 

horror  subtly  troubling  the  most  secluded 
English  fields.  The  references  are  brief;  his 
own  destiny  has  made  them  doubly  poignant. 
But  one  fancies  that  dying  he  may  have  known 
that  he  had  left  behind  him,  in  the  fruits  of 
his  recovered  youth,  work  that  will  make  him 
a  known  and  living  man  to  at  least  a  few  in  all 
succeeding  generations  of  Englishmen. 


[43] 


THE  WALLET  OF  KAI-LUNG. 

EVERYBODY  knows  about  Mr.  Thomas 
Hardy,  Shakespeare,  Lord  Byron  and  Lord 
Tennyson.  This  does  not  detract  from  one's 
enjoyment  of  their  works;  but  there  is  a 
peculiar  and  intense  delight  in  good  books 
which  are  not  commonly  known.  English  lit- 
erature is  sprinkled  with  them,  and  one's  own 
favourites  of  the  kind  one  talks  about  with  a 
peculiar  enthusiasm.  For  myself  I  continually 
urge  people  to  read  Trelawney's  Adventures  of 
a  Younger  Son  and  Coryat's  Crudities,  which, 
famous  enough  in  the  auction  room,  is  seldom 
enough  talked  about  outside  it.  The  present 
age,  like  other  ages,  produces  these  books  that 
are  less  celebrated  than  they  ought  to  be,  and 
one  of  them  is  Mr.  Ernest  Bramah's  The 
Wallet  of  Kai-Lung.  This  work  was  first 
published  by  Mr.  Grant  Richards  in  the  year 
1900.  For  all  I  know  to  the  contrary,  it  fell 
quite  flat;  at  any  rate  since  that  date  Mr.  Belloc 
has  frequently  informed  an  inattentive  public 
that  it  is  one  of  the  best  of  modern  books,  but 

[44] 


THE  WALLET  OF  KAI-LUNG 

one  has  never  heard  it  mentioned  by  any  other 
critic.  Largely,  I  take  it,  on  account  of  Mr. 
Belloc's  recommendation,  Methuens  have  now 
issued  it  in  their  Is.  3d  Library.  It  is  a  volume 
of  Chinese  stories. 

One  does  not  need  to  have  read  many  trans- 
lations from  the  Chinese  to  understand  that 
there  is  a  distinctive,  a  unique,  Chinese  way 
of  looking  at  things.  The  late  Count  Hayashi, 
in  his  memoirs,  observed  that  his  own  country- 
men, whatever  their  material  successes,  could 
not  help  feeling  inferior  in  the  presence  of  the 
civilisation,  the  rounded  philosophy  and  per- 
fect manners,  of  the  Chinese  gentleman.  A 
man  who  reads  Chinese  poetry  is  in  contact 
with  a  mastery  of  the  Art  of  Life.  Religion 
does  not  come  in  much  except  for  rather 
decorative  gods  and  good  spirits  and  demons; 
once  admit  religion  in  our  sense  and  the 
Chinese  conception  of  life  will  not  hold  water. 
But  granted  their  rationalistic  epicureanism 
they  certainly  carry  it  out  to  perfection. 
They  keep  so  superbly  their  balance.  Moved 
by  the  passions,  they  stand  outside  themselves 
and  watch  themselves  with  sympathetic 
humour.  They  would  have  grief  but  not  its 
abandonment,  joy  but  not  its  paroxysms; 
they  are  conscious  of  the  sweet  in  the  bitter 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

and  the  bitter  in  the  sweet.  They  bear  pain, 
and  the  spectacle  of  pain,  with  equanimity; 
yet  their  calm  does  not  degenerate  into  callous- 
ness, and  their  comments  on  the  spectacle  of 
life  fall  through  the  air  like  parti-coloured 
petals,  which  flutter  noiselessly  in  the  wind  and 
show  in  constant  alternation  the  grey  side  of 
irony  and  the  golden  side  of  tenderness. 
They  enjoy  beautiful  things  with  an  exquisite 
sensibility,  but  a  careful  moderation:  wine, 
flowers,  and  the  sky,  snow  upon  the  moun- 
tains, reflections  in  the  water,  song  and  the 
laughter  of  girls.  They  yield  a  little  to  every- 
thing, but  surrender  to  nothing,  save  to  death; 
and  there  they  submit  courteously,  with 
dignity,  and  throwing  back  a  glance  of  no 
more  than  whimsical  regret.  The  old  Chinese 
literature  is  steeped  in  this  philosophy.  They 
have,  it  is  alleged,  no  literature  now  on  a 
higher  level  than  that  which  comes  out  on 
the  tea-boxes.  But  the  manners  and  the 
restraint  remain.  When  the  fall  of  the  Pekin 
Legations  was  in  doubt  the  then  Chinese 
Minister  here,  a  most  enlightened  and  charm- 
ing man,  was  asked  what  would  happen  to 
the  diplomatists  if  the  rebels  got  in.  "  They 
will  be  decahpitated,"  he  said,  with  a  slight 
inclination.  "  But  what  will  happen  to  the 

[46] 


THE  WALLET  OF  KAI-LUNG 

women  and  children? "  continued  the  lady. 
"They  will  be  decahpitated,"  he  said.  "But 
you,  who  are  so  pro-English,  what  would 
happen  to  you  if  you  were  there? "  "  I  should 
be  decahpitated."  He  thought  that  adequate: 
it  was  only  decorous  to  leave  any  anxieties  or 
strong  emotions  he  had  to  be  guessed. 

Mr.  Bramah,  in  his  book,  has  got  the  Chinese 
equanimity  wonderfully;  the  most  moving 
and  the  most  horrible  things  are  told  with 
mild  deprecation;  the  most  grotesquely  farci- 
cal situations  are  analysed  and  developed  with 
a  full  sense  of  their  rich  ludicrousness  but  with 
the  very  slightest  loss  of  gravity  on  the  part 
of  the  narrator.  All  the  characters  behave 
consistently,  veiling  their  actions  and  their 
intentions  behind  the  most  transparent  lies  and 
subterfuges  and  saying  the  most  offensive 
things  in  the  politest  possible  way.  For  it  is 
to  the  comic  side  of  the  Chinese  genius 
that  Mr.  Bramah  chiefly  inclines.  Now  and 
then  he  uses  China  as  an  illustration  of  Europe. 
By  transplanting  customs  and  phrases  he  at 
once  suggests  the  unity  and  the  absurdity  of 
mankind.  In  The  Confession  of  Kai-Lung 
he  is  frankly  preposterous.  He  describes 
Kai-Lung's  early  career  as  an  author  in  terms 
precisely  applicable  to  a  European  literary 

[47] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

failure.  He  began  by  falling  in  love  with  Tiao 
T'sun,  the  most  beautiful  maiden  in  Pekin, 
whom  he  frequently  met 

"  at  flower-feasts,  melon-seed  assemblies,  and 
those  gatherings  where  persons  of  both  sexes 
exhibit  themselves  in  revolving  attitudes,  and 
are  permitted  to  embrace  openly  without 
reproach  " 

(which  reminds  one  of  the  old  lady's  comment 
on  the  Tango,  in  one  of  the  late  "  Saki's " 
books :  "  I  suppose  it  doesn't  matter  if  they 
really  love  one  another").  Kai-Lung  was 
successful  in  his  suit.  Then,  "  on  a  certain 
evening,"  he  says: 

"  this  person  stood  alone  with  Tiao  upon  an 
eminence  overlooking  the  city  and  watched 
the  great  sky-lantern  rise  from  behind  the 
hills.  Under  these  delicate  and  ennobling 
influences  he  gave  speech  to  many  very  orna- 
mental and  refined  thoughts  which  arose 
within  his  mind  concerning  the  graceful  bril- 
liance of  the  light  which  was  cast  all  around, 
yet  notwithstanding  which  a  still  more  excep- 
tional light  was  shining  in  his  own  internal 
organs  by  reason  of  the  nearness  of  an  even 
purer  and  more  engaging  orb.  There  was  no 

[48] 


THE  WALLET  OF  KAI-LUNG 

need,  this  person  felt,  to  hide  even  his  most 
inside  thoughts  from  the  dignified  and  sym- 
pathetic being  at  his  side,  so  without  hesitation 
he  spoke — in  what  he  believes  even  now  must 
have  been  a  very  decorative  manner — of  the 
many  thousand  persons  who  were  then  wrapped 
in  sleep,  of  the  constantly  changing  lights 
which  appeared  in  the  city  beneath,  and  of 
the  vastness  which  everywhere  lay  around. 

'  O  Kai-Lung,'  exclaimed  the  lovely  Tiao, 
when  this  person  had  made  an  end  of  speaking, 
'  how  expertly  and  in  what  a  proficient  manner 
do  you  express  yourself,  uttering  even  the 
sentiments  which  this  person  has  felt  inwardly, 
but  for  which  she  has  no  words.  Why,  indeed, 
do  you  not  inscribe  them  in  a  book? ' 

He  does.  But  while  he  is  absorbed  in  his 
labour  Tiao  accepts  "  the  wedding  gifts  of  an 
objectionable  and  excessively  round-bodied 
individual,  who  had  amassed  an  inconceivable 
number  of  taels  by  inducing  persons  to  take 
part  in  what  at  first  sight  appeared  to  be  an 
ingenious  but  very  easy  competition  connected 
with  the  order  in  which  certain  horses  should 
arrive  at  a  given  and  clearly  defined  spot." 
He  completes  his  work,  publishes  it  at  great 
expense  and  great  loss,  and  makes  a  last 

[49] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

desperate  bid  with  an  effort  to  prove  that  the 
works  of  the  great  national  poet  were  not  sheer 
imitations.  Here,  in  adaptations  from  Shakes- 
speare,  we  lapse  into  burlesque.  There  are 
several  quotations  like:  "O  nobly  intentioned 
but  nevertheless  exceedingly  morose  Tung- 
shin,  the  object  before  you  is  your  distinguished 
and  evilly-disposed-of  father's  honourably- 
inspired  demon " — though  after  all  a  Boer 
dramatic  adapter  did  render  the  same  passage 
as  "  I  am  thy  papa's  spook."  This  excursion, 
however,  does  show  Mr.  Bramah's  style. 
That  style  is  almost  impeccable. 

He  keeps  it  up  from  start  to  finish;  cere- 
monial to  the  point  of  absurdity,  embellished 
with  an  unending  flow  of  maxim  and  euphem- 
ism. It  is  not  possible  here  to  detail  the  com- 
plicated plots  of  his  extremely  ingenious 
stories.  The  best  of  all  is  The  Transmutation 
of  Ling.  Ling  is  a  studious  youth  who  passes 
the  public  examination  and,  to  his  horror,  is 
awarded,  not  a  cosy  nook  in  the  Whitehall  of 
Pekin,  but  the  command  of  a  very  white-livered 
band  of  bowmen  who  have  to  resist  the  contin- 
ual onslaughts  of  exceedingly  ferocious  bandits. 
His  adventurers  are  numerous  and  diverse.  As 
I  say,  I  will  not  tell  the  story,  which  Kai-Lung 
recounts,  standing  with  a  rope  around  his  neck 

[JO] 


THE  WALLET  OF  KAI-LUNG 

and  his  toes  touching  the  ground,  to  a  brigand 
chief  with  a  formidable  snickersnee.  But  one 
may  perhaps  quote  some  of  the  incidental 
proverbs,  which  add  much  to  the  grace  of  the 
tales. 

"  Before  hastening  to  secure  a  possible  reward 
of  five  taels  by  dragging  an  unobservant  person 
away  from  a  falling  building,  examine  well  his 
features  lest  you  find,  when  too  late,  that  it 
is  one  to  whom  you  are  indebted  for  double 
that  amount." 

"  The  road  to  eminence  lies  through  the  cheap 
and  exceedingly  uninviting  eating-houses." 

"  Although  there  exist  many  thousand  subjects 
for  elegant  conversation,  there  are  persons 
who  cannot  meet  a  cripple  without  talking 
about  feet." 

Whether  Mr.  Ernest  Bramah  has  been  to  the 
East  or  has  merely  caught  the  atmosphere  of 
its  literature  I  do  not  know.  I  have  only 
recently  learnt  who  he  is.  But  it  is  not 
surprising  that  one  who  likes  good  satire,  good 
humour,  good  romance  and  good  English 
should  find  the  book  worthy  of  being  an  insep- 
arable companion. 


ONE 

LOVELY  and  pleasant  it  is  to  have  lynxes 
for  readers.  A  little  while  ago  I  referred  to 
a  verbal  solecism  of  which  the  authors  of  the 
King's  English — the  most  salutary  and  divert- 
ing of  all  works  on  composition — would  not 
allow  the  use.  A  reader,  whose  title  to  speak 
is  fully  equal  to  that  of  those  authors,  at  once 
wrote  to  say  that  I  need  not  think  that  I 
avoided  ugly  and  indefensible  English  alto- 
gether. I  am,  he  says,  deep-sunk  in  one  vice 
which  would  certainly  have  been  denounced 
by  the  authors  of  the  King's  English  had  it 
been  as  prevalent  when  they  wrote  as  it  is  now. 
This  is  the  habit  of  using  "  One  "  in  contexts 
where  it  cannot  pretend  to  represent  anything 
but  "  I  "  or  "  me."  He  appends  illustrative 
extracts:  Four  from  Oneself,  one  from  Mr. 
P.  F.  Warner,  one  from  the  Bishop  of  the 
Falkland  Islands,  and  three  from  persons 
unknown — one  of  whom  writes :  "  But  I  have 
known  in  the  small  circle  of  one's  personal 
[52] 


ONE 

friends  quite  a  number  of  Jews  who  .  .  ." 
Guilty! 

The  letter  found  one  in  a  state  in  which 
one's  defences  are  at  their  weakest.  One  was 
(and  is)  in  bed  with  this  loathly  influenza, 
which  has  just  shown  its  lack  of  discrimination 
elsewhere  by  killing  the  harmless  Sultan  of 
Turkey  and  sparing  the  Kaiser.  One's  head 
aches.  One's  spine  aches.  One's  hip-bones 
and  shoulder-blades  ache  and  protrude.  Count- 
less little  sharp  coughs  harry  one's  outworn 
stomach.  One's  throat  is  a  dry  stove-pipe. 
One's  brows  are  tight  and  one's  eyelids  heavy 
with  the  pressure  of  one's  hot  blood.  One 
has  no  taste  for  tobacco;  one  cannot  talk, 
work,  think,  or  drink.  All  one  can  do  is 
to  shut  one's  eyes  until  one  is  bored  with 
that,  and  then  read  until  one  is  exhausted  by 
that. 

I,  I,  I,  I,  I  have,  therefore,  taken  that 
course.  My  reading,  as  always  in  these  cir- 
cumstances, has  been  the  Bacon-Shakespeare 
controversy;  when  I  am  very  ill  indeed  I  think 
there  may  be  something  in  it.  For  two  days 
I  went  from  volume  to  volume,  and  at  last  I 
reached  Sir  Sidney  Lee's  Life  of  Shakespeare. 
This  is,  as  is  generally  admitted,  a  prodigiously 
informative  book,  though  its  title  might  more 

[53] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

accurately   have    been   The   Probable    Life   of 
Shakespeare. 

The  perhapses  drape  the  book  in  festoons 
right  up  to  the  hypothetical  last  malady  which 
Sir  Sidney  introduces  in  these  touching  words: 

;'  The  cause  of  Shakespeare's  death  is  un- 
determined. Chapel  Lane,  which  ran  beside 
his  house,  was  known  as  a  noisome  resort  of 
straying  pigs;  and  the  insanitary  atmosphere 
is  likely  to  have  prejudiced  the  failing  health 
of  a  neighbouring  resident." 

But  it  is  a  great  book.  It  is  an  encyclo- 
paedia; its  compiler  has  written  with  great 
learning,  judgment,  and  fairness  of  mind; 
it  is  not  likely  to  be  superseded  unless  the 
Baconians  suddenly  prove  their  case.  But 
(I  observed  on  my  couch)  Sir  Sidney  has  his 
defects  as  a  writer.  His  ordinary  style,  com- 
pressed and  clear,  is  wonderfully  suited  to  the 
narration  of  dry  facts.  But  when  he  feels  he 
must  be  picturesque  for  a  time  or  two, 
especially  when  he  is  attempting  a  little  of  that 
"  merely  aesthetic  criticism  "  which  he  eschews 
in  his  preface,  he  is  apt  to  be  awkward  with  his 
imagery.  Especially,  he  juxtaposes  incon- 
gruous metaphors  which,  although  moribund, 

[54] 


ONE 

are  not  quite  dead  enough  to  be  put  together 
unnoticed.  When  he  writes  of  "  all  the 
features  of  a  full-fledged  tragi-comedy,"  one 
[I]  cannot  help  wondering  whether  "  features  " 
was  a  misprint  for  "  feathers."  I  was  wonder- 
ing how  it  was  that  so  sensible  and  unrhetorical 
a  man  as  Sir  Sidney  had  left  these  sentences 
in  this  book  after  so  many  editions,  when  the 
letter  arrived  informing  me,  in  the  pleasantest 
way,  that  I  had  a  beam  in  my  own  eye. 

But,  to  continue  our  metaphors,  my  withers 
are  unwrung  by  that  beam.  I  know  that  I 
write  "  one "  when  "  one "  does  not  mean 
"  we,"  or  "  everybody,"  or  "  any  sort  of 
person,"  but  "  I,"  or  "  me,"  and  nothing 
else.  One  does  not  think  one  uses  "  I "  and 
"one"  in  a  single  sentence;  beyond  that  one 
is  quite  unscrupulous.  One  will  say,  for 
instance,  "  One  opened  this  book  with  pleasure," 
which  means,  and  can  only  mean,  "  I  opened 
this  book  ..."  It  is,  from  my  critic's  point 
of  view,  indefensible  and  inexplicable.  Why 
do  I  do  it?  Or,  rather,  why  do  we  do  it? — 
for  I  am  speaking  now,  not  only  for  myself 
but  for  Mr.  Pelham  Warner  and  the  Bishop  of 
the  Falkland  Islands.  The  answer  is  simple. 
Reader,  one  is  modest;  bashful. 

I — for  here  I  will  force  myself  boldly  into 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

the  first  personal  pronoun — do  not  like  seeing 
a  page  of  print  covered  all  over  with  I's. 
Those  I's  are  so  bold,  so  brazen;  they  stand 
up  so,  they  are  so  tall.  Often  and  often  I 
suppress  an  "  I "  as  I  write,  substituting  the 
meaningless,  but  oh  so  comfortable  and  pseudo- 
nymous-looking, "  One."  Sometimes,  owing 
to  long  custom,  the  operation  is  performed 
unconsciously.  And  often  it  is  done  deliber- 
ately after  I  have  written.  The  proofs  come 
back  to  one — here  I  am,  lapsing  again — and 
one  is  struck  by  the  ubiquity  of  those  little 
staring  marks  of  egoism.  Panic  seizes  one. 
"  One  "  offers  cover,  and  one  takes  it. 

There  is  the  negative  advantage;  one  would 
be  a  hypocrite  if  I  were  to  pretend  that  one 
finds  in  the  practice  no  positive  advantage  for 
myself.  If  a  critic  writes,  "  I  admit  that  I 
did  not  approach  this  biography  with  a  favour- 
able bias,  but  it  was  worse  than  I  expected," 
he  is  liable  to  an  uneasy  feeling  when  he  reads 
his  own  words.  All  these  people,  he  will 
reflect,  may  say  to  themselves,  '  What  the 
devil  are  your  biases  to  do  with  us,  and  as  for 
your  opinion,  it  is  only  your  opinion."  But 
knock  out  the  first  person  and  put  "  one " ; 
and  forthwith  the  whole  statement  seems  to 
acquire  the  mysterious  backing  of  all  man- 

[56] 


ONE 

kind.  The  critic's  judgment  looks  like  the 
inevitable  judgment  that  any  sane  man  was 
bound  to  form,  that  masses  of  men  have  simul- 
taneously formed;  there  is  weight,  authority, 
behind  it,  something  of  the  weight  and  au- 
thority of  the  royal,  papal,  or  editorial  "  we." 
That  is  not  a  defence;  it  is  an  explanation 
and  a  very  discreditable  admission.  I  admit 
that  no  really  courageous  or  honest  man 
(always  excepting  Mr.  Pelham  Warner  and 
the  Bishop  of  the  Falkland  Islands)  would 
employ  so  ungainly  a  device  to  secure  such 
dubious  ends.  As  I  have  now  confessed, 
I  suppose  that  it  would  be  futile  to  try  it  in 
these  papers  any  more;  my  unobtrusiveness 
will  no  longer  deceive.  But  if,  in  the  future, 
it  should  be  found  that  my  works  are  covered 
with  what  I  have  heard  another  shy  writer 
describe  as  "  these  horrible  little  telegraph- 
poles,"  do  not  blame  me.  The  responsibility 
for  the  change,  I  hope  I  have  made  clear,  rests 
elsewhere. 


[57] 


ANATOLE  FRANCE 

MR.  LANE'S  English  translation  of  Anatole 
France  has  been  appearing  for  a  good  many 
years  and  there  are  still  volumes  to  come.  The 
latest  is  The  Amethyst  'Ring,  translated  by 
Miss  B.  Drillien  so  perfectly  that  I  shall  seldom 
want  to  look  at  the  French  text  again.  The 
book  is  short.  M.  Bergeret,  the  Latin  Professor 
and  Antiquary  (all  M.  France's  heroes  are 
antiquaries),  comes  in  very  little,  and  then  as  a 
sort  of  chorus.  The  plot  is  a  slight  one  and 
deals  with  a  young  Jew  millionaire's  plot  to 
get  an  abbe  made  into  a  bishop  in  return  for 
the  abbe  getting  him  an  invitation  to  join  the 
aristocratic  Due  de  Brece's  hunt.  Involved 
with  this  are  several  of  the  rather  libidinous 
love-affairs  in  which  M.  France  (who,  though 
he  cannot  always  be  consistent  in  his  negation 
of  morality,  is  always  securely  non-moral  here) 
delights,  and  a  great  deal  of  discussion  of 
the  Dreyfus  affair.  The  love-affairs  are  of 
the  usual  type,  purely  animal.  Young,  rich 
men,  selfish,  and  frequently  surly,  carry  on 

[58] 


ANATOLE  FRANCE 

surreptitious  intrigues  with  married  women, 
whom  they  meet  for  a  few  hours  at  a  time 
in  hired  apartments.  Details  of  furniture  and 
light,  flesh,  and  linen  are  described  with  a  per- 
fect skill  that  almost  makes  the  author's  goat- 
ishness  tolerable;  but  the  more  we  have  read 
of  M.  France's  amorous  interiors  the  staler  they 
grow,  as  they  are  all  so  much  alike,  and  we 
become  violently  conscious  of  his  obsession.  But 
his  outlook  on  politics  is  much  broader,  and  his 
description  of  the  Dreyfus  affair  is,  with  all 
the  limitations  presently  to  be  indicated,  a  his- 
torical document.  We  get  the  two  sides  to  the 
discussion  in  a  normal  provincial  town:  one 
side  taken  by  a  few  intellectual  professors  who 
feel  that  the  Army  and  the  Church  ought  not 
to  be  allowed  to  convict  an  innocent  man  on 
general  grounds;  the  other  taken  by  the 
ecclesiastics  and  gentry,  who  bother  very  little 
about  the  details  as  to  Dreyfus,  but  think  that 
it  is  horrible  to  question  the  verdict  of  an  Army 
Court  and  are,  anyhow,  convinced  that  the  Jews 
are  eating  into  the  vitals  of  contemporary 
France.  No  book  ever  written  was  more 
easy  to  read,  but  this  is  not  owing  to  the 
author's  contribution  to  the  Dreyfus  discussion 
or  to  his  capacity  for  doing  more  than  skim 
the  surface  (though  he  does  that  with  mar- 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

vellous   justice   anl  humour)    of   the   opposed 
cases. 

What  we  like  is  what  we  always  like  in 
M.  France:  the  sly  digs  at  everybody,  the 
kindly  insight  into  human  foibles,  the  brief 
delicious  pictures  of  town  and  country,  church 
and  castle,  and  the  affectionate  discourses  on 
antiquities  of  every  sort,  religious  and  ceramic, 
architectural  and  armorial.  The  evidences 
of  M.  France's  promiscuous  learning  and 
catholic  taste  are  sprinkled  on  every  page.  It 
would  be  impossible  to  find  descriptions  more 
vivid,  more  certain  in  their  atmosphere,  and  in 
their  indications  of  the  differences  made  by  the 
contributions  of  various  ages,  than  M.  France's 
descriptions  of  the  castles  of  Brece  and  Montil. 
He  has  an  almost  physical  feeling  for  the  old 
stones,  the  plate-armour,  the  helmets,  and  the 
weapons,  the  books  behind  their  netting  in  high, 
old  libraries,  the  corridors,  and  staircases,  the 
marble  mantelpieces,  and  bronze  lamps,  iron 
and  brass.  He  is  the  most  versatile  and  de- 
licious connoisseur  on  record.  But  as  for  the 
rest — well,  M.  Bergeret,  asked  whether  truth 
would  prevail,  said,  "  It  is  precisely  what  I, 
personally,  do  not  think,"  and  proceeds  to  ex- 
plain that  falsehood  is  at  once  more  powerful 
and  more  amusing  than  truth.  Thus  speaking, 

[60] 


ANATOLE  FRANCE 

he  took  the  attitude  which,  though  it  may  not 
have  been  natural  to  M.  France,  has  become 
second  nature  to  him. 

For  M.  France  has  the  defects  of  his  qual- 
ities. He  is  a  connoisseur,  an  antiquary,  a  sen- 
timentalist; but  he  is  a  man  of  the  world  only 
in  the  more  limited  sense  of  the  word.  If  he 
encountered  a  great  living  movement  his 
attitude  towards  it  would  be,  whether  for 
rational  reasons  he  gave  it  support  or  not, 
much  the  same  as  that  of  Pontius  Pilate  in  his 
own  story.  The  background  of  his  life  is 
the  background  of  the  essay  in  The  Garden 
of  Epicurus:  an  immense  cold  universe,  full 
of  millions  of  stars  greater  than  this  world, 
and  themselves  perhaps  part  of  a  system  which 
is  a  molecule  in  some  other  system;  and,  save 
for  specks  of  matter,  and  of  life,  which  is  an 
iridescent  gleam  on  the  surface  of  that  matter 
(or,  as  M.  Bergeret  in  a  pessimistic  moment 
put  it,  part  of  a  process  of  physical  decay),  it 
is  all  void.  He  thinks  the  chance  of  immor- 
tality is  about  equal  to  the  chance  of  a  man 
named  Jones  living  in  any  house  arbitrarily 
selected  in  any  street:  and  apparently  he 
regards  the  chance  in  either  case  with  equal 
indifference.  He  is  not  blind  to  enthusiasms; 
but  he  looks  down  on  the  enthusiast  as  a  person 

[61] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

behaving    in    a    quaint    and    rather    pathetic 
manner.     A  "  charming  "  manner,  in  fact. 

Anatole  France  finds  almost  everything 
charming,  from  Tacitus  to  St.  Pierre  and  from 
the  simple  devotion  of  a  girl  communicant 
to  the  fetichism  of  Africa — to  which  he  some- 
where refers  as  "  that  charming  faith."  All 
the  past,  all  the  remains  of  all  the  civilisations, 
all  the  causes  for  which  men  have  lived  and 
died,  all  ancient  vagaries  of  custom,  art,  and 
belief,  they  are  all  "  charming "  and  they  all 
go  into  his  mental  cabinet.  His  perceptions 
are  most  delicate;  his  sympathy  is  wide  and 
ready  enough  to  enable  him  to  allow  its  little 
due  of  tenderness  to  every  human  suffering 
and  aspiration  and  joy,  its  little  tribute  of  easy 
tears  to  every  soft  landscape  and  every 
forlorn  relic  of  old  endeavour,  its  little  meed 
of  admiration  to  every  heroic  effort.  But 
all,  all  seem  small  to  him  and  all  are  in  danger 
of  that  fatal  epithet  so  suitable  to  the  pastorals 
of  Watteau  and  the  engravings  of  Eisen,  but, 
however  effective  at  first  sight,  so  misplaced 
and  inadequate  when  applied  to  the  deep 
realities  of  life.  He  can,  in  his  own  colours, 
recreate  the  past;  he  is  learned  in  it,  and  he 
has  an  affection  for  it.  But  he  deals  with  the 
present  as  he  deals  with  the  past,  looking  at 

[62] 


ANATOLE  FRANCE 

it  from  above,  with  an  ironic  tenderness  and 
a  tender  irony.  Sometimes,  since  the  living, 
are  alive  and  kicking  as  the  dead  are  not,  he 
finds  that  his  puppets  hit  back  at  him;  he 
cannot  (being  human)  like  that,  and  he  has 
not  yet  sufficiently  recovered  his  balance  to 
find  the  French  Symbolists  charming.  But 
even  if  he  did  he  would  emotionally  miss,  though 
he  might  intellectually  apprehend,  the  essential 
in  them,  just  as  in  this  book  he  misses  the 
essential  in  the  best  of  the  Anti-Drey fusards. 
He  is  fair  as  far  as  he  can  be.  He  no  more  pal- 
liates the  corruption  of  financiers  and  politicians 
(though  he  overlooks  the  ridiculousness  of 
rationalists)  than  he  does  the  stupidity  and 
bigotry  of  soldiers,  priests,  and  the  old  noblesse. 
But  he  exhibits  them  all  with  a  softening  veil 
before  them.  What  they  do  little  matters;  the 
bestiality  of  the  intriguers  and  the  brutes,  the 
burning  idealism  of  those  who  on  the  one  side 
thought  an  innocent  man  was  being  persecuted 
and  on  the  other  side  felt  that  France  was 
being  befouled  by  a  crowd  of  rotten  politicians 
and  gross  and  greedy  international  Jews,  alike 
escape  him.  He  dislikes  both  injustice  and 
vulgarity;  but  dislike  is  as  strong  a  word  as 
one  can  use. 

He   hates   nothing:     not   even   the    Catholic 

[63] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Church,  which,  indeed,  has  had  a  lifelong 
fascination  for  him,  although  he  classes  Chris- 
tianity with  the  cults  of  the  Ibos  and  Ojibways 
and  below  those  of  the  Greeks.  He  can  see 
hate;  he  knows  what  it  is  like  in  other  people; 
he  has  been  tinged  with  its  emanations;  but 
he  has  not  felt  it.  He  thinks  it,  unless  it 
is  uncomfortably  close,  charming;  if  it  is 
close  he  refuses  to  see  it  as  it  is.  It  is  one  thing 
to  write  of  the  past  as  if  it  were  the  present; 
it  is  another  thing  to  write  of  the  present 
as  if  it  were  the  past,  and  that  is  what  Anatole 
France  has  done.  He  is  a  connoisseur  first 
and  a  man  afterwards:  taste  and  wit  are  for 
him  substitutes  for  morality  and  religion. 
All  things  are  trivial  and  if  they  are  not 
already  charming,  time  will  soon  make  them  so. 
But  the  man  who  finds  passion  charming  has 
never  felt  it;  the  man  who  finds  anger  charm- 
ing has  never  known  it;  and  the  man  who  finds 
death  charming  has  never  feared  it.  The 
philosophy  which  has  dominated  Anatole 
France  has  made  him,  with  some  deliberation, 
seal  the  springs  of  enthusiasm,  of  love,  and  of 
worship.  He  feels  himself  larger  than  life 
but  he  is  not.  The  result  is  that  he  has  never 
become  the  novelist  he  might  have  been,  a 
novelist  like  Dickens  or  Balzac.  If  he  lives, 


ANATOLE  FRANCE 

as  I  think  he  will  live,  he  will  live  as  a  maker 
of  bijouterie,  a  craftsman,  a  witty  and  dainty 
essayist.  In  his  kind  he  is  a  perfect  artist; 
that  one  complains  of  him  is  a  tribute  to  his 
unexploited 


[65] 


NATURAL  WRITING 

SOME  time  ago  I  wrote  an  article  on  George 
Meredith  which  "  elicited "  (gentle  Jew,  I 
thank  thee  for  that  word)  an  enormous  mass  of 
correspondence.  It  will,  or  rather  (if  I  may 
assume  an  unjournalistic  candour)  it  will  not, 
be  remembered  that  I  then  explained  my 
aversion  to  much  in  the  character  and  writings 
of  that  great  man.  My  "  peg "  was  a  book 
published  by  one  of  George  Meredith's  relatives 
and  containing  certain  sidelights  on  his  life.  I 
did  not  really  base  my  objection  to  Meredith  on 
facts  "disclosed"  by  his  biographer;  it  was 
more  general  and  deep-seated;  it  was  an 
objection  which  had  its  roots  in  a  feeling  that 
in  his  life  and  in  his  writings  he  was  so  artificial 
that  one  could  not  discover  the  real  man.  In 
the  course  of  what  I  hope  I  may  call  my  argu- 
ment I  complained  about  the  strained  tortu- 
osities and  insincerities  of  his  writing.  It 
was  on  this  complaint  that  the  only  corre- 
spondent who  disagreed  with  my  article 
fastened:  for  most  of  them  wrote  emotionally 
[66] 


NATURAL  WRITING 

to  say  that  with  this  key  I  had  unlocked  their 
hearts,  that  they  had  always  felt  a  sort  of 
a  something  about  Meredith  which  they  had 
been  unable  to  define,  or  that  they  had  always 
disliked  him  and  never  had  the  courage  to 
say  so. 

My  correspondent  says:  "If  you  object  to 
Meredith's  language,  how  can  you  tolerate 
that  of  Henry  James?  Why  should  not  a  man 
write  as  he  likes  if  he  has  something  to  say?" 
Well,  I  am  prepared  to  face  the  first  question 
directly.  I  don't  worship  any  writer  for  his 
faults,  and  I  don't  think  that  James,  especially 
the  later  James,  wrote  the  sort  of  English  that 
I  should  like  to  see  repeated.  His  sentences 
twisted  and  sprawled,  his  metaphors  clustered 
and  clung,  until  it  was  often  necessary  to  read 
his  sentences  several  times  over  to  make 
certain  of  his  meaning.  Yet  his  obscurity 
and  discursiveness  seem  to  me  very  different 
from  those  of  Meredith.  James  did  not,  as  a 
rule,  use  far-fetched  words,  or  drag  in  meta- 
phors for  their  own  sakes,  or  elongate  sentences 
in  order  to  produce  the  effect  of  a  firework 
display.  He  was  far  more  likely  to  use  slang 
words  and  to  tangle  his  sentences  with  "  as 
they  say,"  "  so  to  speak,"  and  "  at  least  in 
so  far  as,"  which  are  ordinary  of  the  ordinary. 

[67] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

His  obscurity  was  the  direct  fruit  of  his  passion 
for  precision,  his  complexity  was  the  child  of  his 
desire  for  simplicity.  He  wanted  to  state 
everything  accurately;  he,  therefore,  intro- 
duced sub-clause  after  sub-clause  for  the  sake 
of  making  what  he  thought  necessary  reserva- 
tions, and  metaphor  after  metaphor  sprang 
to  his  pen  to  convey  just  the  shade  of  meaning 
that  he  wanted  to  express.  In  his  later  years 
it  was  his  habit  to  dictate  a  typescript,  to 
dictate  a  second  from  the  first,  and  to  dictate 
a  third  from  the  second.  In  each  round  or 
lap  new  qualifications  and  amplifications  were, 
usually  clumsily,  crowded  in,  until  there  was 
a  final  draft  overfull  of  detail  and  very  difficult 
to  read.  But  though  his  passion  for  precision 
might  irritate  some  readers  (Mr.  H.  G.  Wells 
compared  his  efforts  to  those  of  a  hippopotamus 
picking  up  a  pea)  who  felt  that  such  a  degree 
of  intellectual  power  ought  not  to  be  expended 
upon  trifles,  even  they  had  to  respect  that 
power  and  the  sincerity  with  which  he  used 
it:  the  hippopotamus  is  a  big  creature  and 
this  one  was  admirably  painstaking.  The 
one  thing  nobody  ever  suggested  about  James 
was  that  he  was  insincere  or  pretentious. 

Meredith,  on  the  other  hand,  was  led   into 
obscurity   by   his   desire   to   impress:    he   was 
[68] 


NATURAL  WRITING 

only  intermittently  sincere,  he  liked  to  "  show 
off,"  he  overloaded  his  work  with  superfluous 
decoration  which  was  often  not  even  good 
decoration.  His  obscurities  were  like  the 
abracadabras  of  the  medicine  man;  jargon 
primarily  intended  to  impress  the  uninitiated. 
I  remember  a  man  telling  me  that  he  had  spent 
a  day  with  Meredith  and  that  the  novelist, 
before  lunch,  had  said  to  him,  ' '  Would  you 
like  to  lave  your  hands?"  Well,  a  man  might 
say  that  facetiously;  anybody  might.  But 
of  Meredith  it  was  characteristic.  His  cheap 
jewellery  was  sometimes  very  glittering,  and 
it  was  mixed  up  with  genuine  gems.  He  had 
genius,  intellect,  and  imagination,  but  he  did 
not  trust  it.  He  was  not  so  much  afraid  to  be 
himself;  he  positively  disliked  to  be  himself; 
he  wanted  to  be  something  more  brilliant  and 
mysterious,  so  he  expended  enormous  energy 
in  fabrication  instead  of  being  content  with 
creation.  He,  who  when  he  was  natural,  was 
great,  usually  refused  to  be.  The  ordinary 
word  passed  through  his  mind  and,  either 
before  or  after  it  reached  paper,  he  deleted  it 
and  substituted  the  unusual,  as  a  rule  gaining 
literally  nothing  by  the  change. 

A    man     should     write     naturally.       Men's 
natures    differ.    It    is    natural    to    some,    for 

[69] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

one  reason  or  another,  to  write  parenthetically; 
it  is  natural  to  some  to  write  metaphysically; 
it  is  natural  to  some  (as  it  is  to  the  illustrious 
author  of  Wanderings  in  Arabia  Deserta)  to 
use  an  outlandish  compost  of  words.  But 
whereas  I  never  feel  that  Mr.  Doughty  is 
dragging  in  his  extraordinary  Saxon  words 
to  bewilder  me  or  compel  my  admiration,  with 
Meredith  I  usually  feel  that  he  is  being 
self-consciously  artificial.  We  cannot  help 
our  natures,  our  tastes,  the  bents  of  our 
minds;  but  we  can  at  least  be  true  to 
ourselves. 

We  must  be,  when  writing,  as  natural  and 
as  simple  as  our  natures,  given  full  play,  will 
allow  us  to  be.  I  must  not  be  misunderstood 
to  say  that  we  should  write  precisely  as  we 
speak.  It  is  not  a  good  thing  even  to  speak 
exactly  as  we  speak.  The  M.P.  who  (Hansard 
and  the  newspaper  put  his  orations  a  little 
straight)  says,  "  Mr.  Speaker,  I  rise  to  say, 
I  mean  I  get  up  to  announce  that — er — if  this 
Bill,  this  measure,  gets  through,  passes — er — 
it  is  impossible  to  say  what  will  happen,  Sir, 
the  country  is  well  on  the  way  to  the  road  to 
ruin,"  is  in  a  manner  speaking  naturally;  but 
that  is  not  the  style  one  commends.  The 
ordinary  reviewer,  if  he  wrote  his  criticisms 

[70] 


NATURAL  WRITING 

precisely  as  he  talks,  would  come  out  with 
passages  like: 

"  We  are  just  about  fed  up  to  the  teeth  with 
stuff  like  Mr.  Timms's  novel.  We  don't  mean 
it  is  absolute  rot,  as  the  chap  has  got  some 
intelligence.  But  he  is  playing  the  fool  pretty 
badly,  and  if  he  goes  on  like  this  God  help  him." 

But  language  may  be  what  we  call  natural — 
that  is  to  say  may  fail  to  make  the  reader  feel 
that  somebody  is  performing  tricks  in  front  of 
him — without  being  vulgar,  and  it  may  ring 
sincerely  without  being  colloquial.  Meredith, 
had  he  had  to  deliver  the  obvious  kind  of 
judgment  recorded  in  that  imaginary  extract, 
would  probably  have  begun  with  "  Come  we 
now  to  Mr.  Timms,  ambushed  by  all  the 
sprites,  an  eye,  distinctly,  nay  desperately, 
intelligent  still  gleaming  darkly  amid  the 
weedy  abysms  of  the  sentimental  brake. 
Icarus,  one  would  say,  rather,  Dsedalus,  for  that 
he,  etc.,  etc.,"  and  even  after  that  he  would 
have  gone  through  it  barbarously  revising, 
knocking  out  "  ambushed "  in  favour  of 
"  ambuscadoed "  or  even  "  embuscadoed," 
and  dropping  in  adventitious  tropes.  Writing 
such  as  his  is  at  its  worst  seems  to  me  to  have 
the  vilest  possible  fault :  it  is  "  made  up,"  it  is 

[71] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Heartless  rococo.  And  if  the  same  criteria 
that  we  apply  to  him  are  applied  to  others  we 
shall  find  that  all  sorts  of  English  writers 
stay  in  our  net,  and  that  writers  of  many 
different  kinds  slip  through  it.  Contortions 
are  not  in  themselves  evidence  of  artificiality; 
and  there  is  a  kind  of  hollow  simplicity  and 
clarity  which  rings  more  false  than  anything 
in  the  world.  For  at  bottom  "  the  style  is  the 
man,"  and  a  style  which,  whatever  its  other 
merits  or  defects,  annoys  us  by  its  air  of  arti- 
ficiality, is  merely  the  mask  of  a  man  who  does 
not  really  mean,  or  feel,  what  he  says.  Here  I 
must  introduce  a  qualification.  Anyone  who 
took  the  above  remarks  literally  might  get  the 
false  impression  that  I  was  suggesting  that, 
provided  two  styles  were  equally  free  from 
pose,  they  are  equally  meritorious.  This 
would  be  ridiculous,  a  man's  style  is  adorned 
by  all  kinds  of  things;  some  most  unaffected 
people  have  no  ear;  others  have  a  mania  for 
digressions;  others  have  a  small  or  inexact 
vocabulary;  whole  books  have  been  and  will  be 
written  about  style.  But  I  do  lay  it  down  as 
a  postulate  that  a  man  should  not  deliberately 
festoon  his  work  with  insincere  archaisms  or 
unilluminating  figures  of  speech,  and  that  every 
man,  in  so  far  as  it  is  consistent  with  saying 

[72] 


NATURAL  WRITING 

just  what  he  wants  to  say,  should  be  as  clear 
in  his  writing  as  possible.  Even  Meredith,  I 
suspect,  if  he  went  into  a  public-house  to  get 
a  drink,  took  care  that  the  bar-man  should  be 
in  no  doubt  as  to  what  he  wanted. 

This,   however,   is  not   the   last   word   upon 
style,  which  includes  many  things. 


[73] 


SECRET  HISTORY 

:<  WE  are  the  people  of  England  who  never 
have  spoken  yet,"  is  the  refrain  of  one  of  Mr. 
Chesterton's  old  songs,  and  the  thesis  of  his 
Short  History  of  England  (published  by 
Chatto  and  Windus),  which  may  be  destined  to 
be  the  most  useful  of  his  many  useful  books. 
Mr.  Chesterton  does  not  pretend  to  be  a  scholar, 
and  he  would  probably  not  be  surprised  if  he 
were  told  that  there  were  numbers  of  inaccura- 
cies in  his  book  and  numbers  of  important 
qualifications  out  of  it.  He  will  go  a  little  too 
far  sometimes  for  an  antithesis,  a  joke,  or  a 
climax;  and  at  some  places  in  his  history  the 
learned  may  say,  "  This  is  all  wrong."  But 
what  matters  is  that  the  general  motive  and 
arguments  are  all  right.  Mr.  Chesterton  has  a 
knowledge  of  human  nature,  a  love  of  his 
countrymen,  a  belief  in  democracy,  and,  in  spite 
of  his  strong  opinions,  a  regard  for  truth. 
These  are  not  always  among  the  virtues  of 
historians,  and  historians  frequently  lack  the 
convictions  that  men  are  not  born  on  the  earth 

[74] 


SECRET  HISTORY 

for  nothing  (that  is,  that  life  is  worth  living) 
and  that  the  test  of  a  civilisation  is  the  sort 
of  life  that  the  majority  of  its  members  live. 
Mr.  Chesterton  has  those  convictions  and  he 
refuses  to  accept  the  common  delusion  that 
a  civilisation  of  1900  must  be  higher  than  a 
civilisation  of  1800,  because  1900  is  after  1800; 
lie,  on  the  whole,  is  compelled  to  plump  for 
the  brief  zenith  of  the  Middle  Ages,  as  the  best 
period  of  a  bad  lot  in  the  history  of  the  English 
people.  It  is  not  sentimental  mediaevalism, 
and  he  is  not  blind  either  to  the  advantages  we 
have  over  our  mediaeval  ancestors  or  to  the  still 
greater  advantages  we  might  have  if  we  only 
decided  to  regenerate  our  society  instead  of 
fatalistically  submitting  to  the  operation  of 
"  economic  forces " — which  are  usually  other 
words  for  the  unbridled  greed  or  undirected 
energy  of  individual  men  whom  we  are,  if  we 
only  care  to,  at  complete  liberty  to  control, 
silence,  lock  up,  or  smite  hip  and  thigh.  He 
looks  at  the  past  with  the  eyes  of  a  decent  man 
who  maintains  that  men  have  souls  and  that 
they  should  be  treated  like  Christians;  and  by 
that  test  he  judges  what  has  and  what  has 
not  been  done. 

Never   losing   sight    of   that   he   gallops    at 
top  speed  through  English  history;  he  misses 

[75] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

great  spaces,  but  wherever  his  hoof  touches  it 
strikes  out  fire.  Continually  he  tosses  off  a 
sentence,  the  product  of  a  clear  eye  and  an 
untainted  heart,  which  will  shatter  the  con- 
ventional reader's  preconceptions.  '  The  first 
half  of  English  history,"  he  says,  "  has  been 
made  quite  unmeaning  in  the  schools  by  the 
attempt  to  tell  it  without  reference  to  that 
corporate  Christendom  in  which  it  took  part 
and  pride."  There  is  no  need  for  commentary 
on  this:  it  is  simple  truth.  And  it  is  equally 
true  that  we  cannot  understand  the  struggle 
between  Henry  II.  and  Becket  unless  we 
understand  what  the  Church  stood  for  as  well 
as  what  the  Plantagenet  monarchy  stood  for. 
Becket  did  not  lose  favour  and  die  merely  in 
order  that  guilty  clergymen  should  escape 
the  proper  reward  of  their  crimes;  and  the 
situation  cannot  be  rightly  assessed  unless  we 
consider  Henry's  action  in  going  to  be  flogged 
at  Becket's  tomb,  and  the  popular  reverence 
of  Becket,  together  with  the  legal  struggle  that 
preceded  the  tragedy.  The  early  legends 
— all  our  heroes,  he  notes,  are  anti-barbaric — 
the  Reformation,  the  Civil  Wars  and  the 
Eighteenth  Century  are  all  treated,  perhaps 
sketchily,  but  with  a  verisimilitude  that 
convinces.  At  every  point  the  orthodox  nar- 

[76] 


SECRET  HISTORY 

rators  stand  condemned;  and  everywhere  they 
have  failed  to  attempt  to  grasp  the  real 
mind  of  the  masses  of  the  people  and  even — 
if  the  period  is  distant  enough — that  of  their 
governors.  Nowhere  is  this  more  noticeable 
than  in  the  common  treatment  of  the  Crusades. 
They  were  not  fought  for  nothing.  They  were 
not  fought  for  gain.  They  were  not  fought  out 
of  bigotry.  There  was  good  and  evil  mixed 
in  them,  but  no  wars  in  human  history  were 
fought  for  a  better  cause  and  none  appealed 
more  strongly  to  the  souls  of  common  men. 
No  more,  again,  do  our  historians  attempt  to 
visualise  the  great  buildings  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  and  what  was  behind  them:  they  merely 
say  they  are  there  and  give  the  Middle  Ages 
one  good  mark  for  them.  Opinions  such  as 
these  Mr.  Chesterton  maintains  with  his  usual 
wit  and  his  usual  eloquence;  his  jokes  are 
seldom  forced  in  this  book,  and  in  many  places 
he  rises  into  noble  passages  of  English  prose. 
He  lets  out  with  immense  good  humour  and 
effect  at  pedants  of  all  sorts,  especially  anthro- 
pologists and  Teuto-mongers ;  and  he  gives 
by  the  way  character  sketches,  particularly 
two  of  Sir  Thomas  More  and  Richard  III., 
which  are  both  brilliant  and  plausible.  And 
he  drives  home  an  obvious  truth  when  he 

[77] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

accuses  us  of  magnifying  the  defects  of  the 
Middle  Ages  by  telescoping  our  chronicles. 
Certainly  if  a  man  were  to  write  in  eight  pages 
a  history  of  the  last  century,  mentioning 
principally  the  wars  and  the  sweating,  he  could 
make  us  out  one  of  the  basest  generations  on 
record.  And  that  without  falling  back  upon 
the  ugliness  of  our  civilisation  and  that  mental 
plague,  which,  as  Mr.  Chesterton  observes,  has 
left  us  worshipping  in  children  all  that  we  have 
crushed  out  in  men. 

The  book  is  not  a  history.  It  is  a  historical 
essay.  It  covers  two  thousand  years  in  three 
hundred  pages,  and  the  general  propositions 
leave  little  room  for  the  facts  which  might 
illustrate  them.  But  it  might  well  be  used  by 
a  more  laborious  writer  as  the  theoretical 
basis  for  a  history  on  the  grand  scale.  Every 
contention  that  Mr.  Chesterton  advances, 
every  institution  that  he  describes,  every 
trend  of  sentiment  that  he  detects,  might  be 
documented  from  ruins  and  records,  charters 
and  songs,  traditions  and  laws.  The  "  evi- 
dences "  for  such  a  work  lie  scattered  in  thou- 
sands of  books,  buildings  and  memories,  not 
to  speak  of  the  minds  of  living  men:  the 
one  place  where  you  will  never  find  them  in 
large  numbers  is  a  formal  history  book.  The 

[78] 


SECRET  HISTORY 

manner  of  writing  history  has  been  subject  to 
fashions.  At  first  men  compiled — and  they 
were  then,  at  least  to  some  extent,  in  touch 
with  humanity — very  undiscriminating  chron- 
icles in  which,  if  battles  received  too  much 
attention,  at  least  they  were  battles  and  not 
merely  episodes  in  economic  development, 
and  if  legends  received  too  generous  an  accept- 
ance, at  least  there  was  no  assumption  that  you 
could  understand  men's  deeds  without  under- 
standing their  dreams.  The  scientific  spirit 
grew  and  the  development  of  institutions  was 
given,  quite  properly,  increased  attention. 
The  1297  Parliament  of  Stow-in-the-Woldi  the 
Charter  of  Chudleigh,  the  refusal  of  the  Hemp 
Subsidy,  and  other  such  incidents  became 
landmarks  with  whole  pages  to  themselves. 
Anxious  to  know  how  the  British  Constitu- 
tion, in  its  widest  sense,  had  reached  its  present 
condition,  men  catalogued  ancient  laws  without 
really  bothering  about  their  origins  and  ob- 
jects, and  stared  hard  at  ancient  offices  with- 
out visualising  the  men  who  occupied  them. 
Political  economy  came  into  existence,  and 
more  was  said  about  exports,  imports,  the  mer- 
cantile theory,  the  discovery  of  the  Mexican 
silver  mines,  the  trading  companies,  and  the 
Enclosures  Acts.  Finally,  it  became  a  com- 

[79] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

monplace  amongst  the  enlightened  that  too 
little  had  been  said  about  the  "  condition  of 
the  people  "  throughout  history.  Green  wrote, 
with  a  laudable  ambition,  a  work,  the  title 
of  which  recognised  this.  Paragraphs  on  the 
Black  Death  and  the  Peasants'  Revolt  began 
to  be  sprinkled  with  a  few  quotations  from 
Langland;  attempts  were  made  at  a  sys- 
tematic study  of  our  forefathers'  wages;  and 
the  excursus  on  the  manners  and  pastimes  of 
the  multitude  became  common  form.  But 
whatever  the  narrative  fashion  of  the  age,  and 
whatever  the  idiosyncrasies  of  particular  his- 
torians, the  real  history  of  the  English  people 
remains  to  be  written.  There  have  been  his- 
torians who  have  treated  their  subjects  in  a 
human  way,  and  who  have  avoided  quite  openly 
the  dry  pseudo-scientific  method.  One  wrote 
to  celebrate  the  greatness  of  Tudor  England; 
another  to  celebrate  the  triumphs  of  Whiggery. 
They  were  entitled  to  their  opinions  and  their 
heroes:  but  of  none  of  them  was  the  hero  the 
English  people,  and  none  of  them  were  pri- 
marily concerned  with  the  opinions,  the  emotions 
and  the  experiences  of  the  English  people.  Our 
histories  are  all  histories  of  the  crust:  if  kings 
and  aristocrats  are  not  the  only  people  who 
matter,  then  politicians  and  intellectuals  are 

[80] 


SECRET  HISTORY 

the  only  people  who  matter.  The  masses  may 
be  completely  disregarded  or  they  may  be  re- 
garded with  a  measure,  great  or  small,  of  sym- 
pathy: but  when  they  are  not  forgotten  they 
are,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  patronised, 
and  openly  or  by  implication  denounced. 
Above  all  our  history  has  been  run  in  the  in- 
terests of  Industrialism,  and  where  Progress 
has  failed  to  be  progressive  historians  have, 
often  so  naturally  that  they  were  unaware  of 
it,  blinded  themselves  to  good  things  we  have 
lost  and  the  manner  of  our  losing  them.  Eng- 
lish history  is,  in  effect,  a  whitewashing  of  the 
fait  accompli. 

Those  are  Mr.  Chesterton's  contentions,  just 
as  they  were  the  contentions  of  Mr.  Maurice 
Hewlett's  fine  agricultural  epic  The  Song  of 
the  Plow,  the  history  of  which  bears  a  close 
resemblance  to  Mr.  Chesterton's.  It  doesn't 
matter  whether  he  tells  the  whole  truth  or 
not;  at  any  rate,  he  emphasises  many  truths 
commonly  overlooked.  And  if  he  also  has  a 
log  to  roll  it  is,  at  any  rate,  a  more  important 
log  than  the  others.  He,  like  Mr.  Hewlett, 
ends  with  the  war  and  the  transfiguration  of 
the  common  disinherited  man,  called  upon  at 
last  to  confront  the  nation  which  above  all 
others  had  been  praised  by  his  professors 

[81] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

and  his  politicians  as  a  pioneer  of  civilisa- 
tion: 

"  He  in  whose  honour  all  has  been  said  and 
sung  stirred,  and  stepped  across  the  border  of 
Belgium.  Then  were  spread  out  before  men's 
eyes  all  the  beauties  of  his  culture  and  all  the 
benefits  of  his  organisation;  then  we  beheld 
under  a  lifting  daybreak  what  light  we  had 
followed  and  after  what  image  we  had  laboured 
to  refashion  ourselves.  Nor  in  any  story  of 
mankind  has  the  irony  of  God  chosen  the 
foolish  things  so  catastrophically  to  confound 
the  wise.  For  the  common  crowd  of  poor  and 
ignorant  Englishmen,  because  they  only  knew 
that  they  were  Englishmen,  burst  through  the 
filthy  cobwebs  of  four  hundred  years  and  stood 
where  their  fathers  stood  when  they  knew  that 
they  were  Christian  men.  The  English  poor, 
broken  by  every  revolt,  bullied  by  every  fashion, 
long  despoiled  of  property,  and  now  being 
despoiled  of  liberty,  entered  history  with  a 
noise  of  trumpets,  and  turned  themselves  in  two 
years  into  one  of  the  iron  armies  of  the  world. 
And  when  the  critic  of  politics  and  literature, 
feeling  that  this  war  is  after  all  heroic,  looks 
around  him  to  find  the  hero,  he  can  point  to 
nothing  but  a  mob." 

[82] 


SECRET  HISTORY 

This  also  the  scientific  materialist  will  call 
rhetoric,  and  look  for  his  explanations  else- 
where, not  seeing,  or  blind  to  their  beauty  if 
he  does  see  them,  the  multitudinous  idealisms 
and  loves  and  loyalties  in  the  host  of  inarticulate 
breasts  whose  only  speech  is  action — and  a 
misleading  jest.  But  there  is  truth  in  the 
rhetoric,  and  the  truth  will  be  told  about  no 
large  movement  of  humanity  unless  the  imagi- 
nation and  the  emotions  are  brought  to  bear 
upon  the  facts.  Wat  Tyler's  followers,  usually 
described  as  "  a  peasantry  resentful  of  an  un- 
just poll-tax,"  cannot  be  comprehended  by 
that  phrase;  a  whole  novel  would  not  be  too 
long  to  display  the  confused  minds  of  those 
resentful  and  then  briefly  exhilarated  men  who, 
though  illiterate  and  no  doubt  incapable  of 
formulating  a  system  which  would  establish  and 
secure  what  they  wanted,  had  a  Utopia  of  a 
sort  in  their  hearts  and  knew  what  they  immedi- 
ately wanted,  and  that  in  justice  they  should 
have  it,  and  were  prepared  to  risk  their  lives 
that  their  class  might  have  it.  Mr.  Chesterton's 
short  passage  on  the  Pilgrimage  of  Grace  lets 
far  more  light  in  on  the  state  of  mind  behind 
that  rebellion  than  any  amount  of  "  facts " 
about  it  backed  by  lifeless  references  to  "  those 
whose  sympathies  still  clung  to  the  old  regime." 

[83] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

But  one  might  come  nearer.  I  happen  to  re- 
member the  1906  election  and  the  campaign  in 
the  rural  constituencies  of  which  I  saw  a  good 
deal.  A  great  and  successful  appeal  was  made 
to  the  agricultural  labourer.  The  outcome  of  it 
was  a  largely  unworkable  and  unworked  Small 
Holdings  Act.  The  Act  will  get  a  few  lines 
in  the  histories:  the  appeal  will  probably  get 
none  at  all.  Moreover  few,  even  of  the  men 
who  made  that  appeal,  and  dangled  before  the 
labourer  the  realisation  of  his  age-long  hope 
of  work  in  liberty  with  a  proper  reward  on  the 
land  which  is  in  his  bones,  exercised  their  imagi- 
nations sufficiently  to  realise  what  the  promise 
and  the  disappointment  meant  to  him.  For  he 
does  not  write  books,  he  is  slow  of  speech,  he 
can  only  vote,  after  all,  for  one  side  or  the 
other,  and — in  the  end — centuries  of  frustra- 
tion have  made  him  resigned,  and  he  is  quite 
prepared,  as  often  as  necessary,  to  submerge 
his  useless  aspirations  in  a  pint  of  beer.  If  the 
history  of  England  still  remains  unwritten  Mr. 
Chesterton's  book  may  at  least  teach  the  next 
generation  of  historians  their  business. 


MR.  ASQUITH  AS  AUTHOR 

EXCLUDING  collections  of  political  speeches, 
Mr.  Asquith's  Occasional  Addresses,  1908-16,  is 
his  first  book;  unless,  indeed,  like  most  able 
young  lawyers,  he  wrote  something  about  Torts 
or  Company  Law  in  an  earlier  age.  The  book 
consists  mainly  of  five  considerable  addresses :  on 
Criticism,  Biography,  Ancient  Universities  and 
the  Modern  World,  Culture  and  Character,  and 
the  Spade  and  the  Pen — the  last  being  con- 
cerned with  classical  studies  and  the  place  of 
archaeology.  There  are  also  lesser  addresses 
on  the  English  Bible,  Omar  Khayyam,  and 
other  subjects,  a  Latin  speech  made  at  Win- 
chester, and  several  obituary  "  tributes  "  to  emi- 
nent men  deceased.  These  last,  perhaps,  would 
not  all  have  been  included  had  Mr.  Asquith  not 
desired  to  give  the  public  a  respectable  sized 
book  for  its  money. 

But  the  smaller  book  would  have  been  well 
worth  it.  No  professional  author  has  con- 
structed in  our  time  so  clear,  so  compressed,  so 
convincing  a  defence  of  the  humanities,  and  so 

[85] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

eloquent  a  demonstration  of  their  daily  prac- 
tical value  as  Mr.  Asquith  has  produced  in  the 
sporadic  addresses  of  his  restricted  leisure.  It 
is  not  to  be  supposed  that  he  devotes  himself 
entirely  to  generalisations  as  to  "  culture,"  ab- 
sorbed discursively,  or  under  curriculum.  Both 
his  addresses  to  students  and  the  others  are  full 
of  incidental  judgments  upon  books  and  men, 
criticisms  usually  indisputable,  and  often  origi- 
nal. His  criticisms  of  the  literatures  of  the 
ancient  world,  as  well  as  of  English  books  of 
several  centuries,  would  be  well  worth  having  if 
they  illustrated  no  general  argument  at  all.  His 
tastes  are,  on  the  whole,  orthodox;  one  deduces 
that  he  is  most  drawn  to  the  admittedly  great- 
est of  writers.  But  though  never  eccentric,  he 
thinks  independently.  The  evidences  of  this 
are  everywhere.  One  may  quote  his  acute  ob- 
servation that 

"  if  we  were  given  fewer  of  a  man's  letters  to 
his  friends,  and  more  of  his  friends'  letters  to 
him,  we  should  get  to  know  him  better  because, 
among  other  reasons,  we  should  be  better  able 
to  realise  how  his  personality  affected  and 
appealed  to  others." 

One  may  quote  also  his  illuminating  pages  on 
the   neglected   autobiography  of  Haydon,   the 
[86] 


MR.  ASQUITH  AS  AUTHOR 

painter;  his  description  of  Haydon  as  "one 
of  the  acutest  and  most  accomplished  critics 
of  his  time,"  and  his  question,  though  it  be  a 
mere  question,  why  it  was  that  Haydon  was 
not  a  great  portrait  painter.  We  may  note, 
incidentally,  as  lights  on  his  tastes,  that  he  is 
a  close  student  of  Bacon  and  a  devotee  of  Sir 
Walter  Scott,  and  that  he  believes  most  of 
Shakespeare's  sonnets  to  have  had  no  relation 
with  the  poet's  personal  career.  I  have  not, 
however,  space  here  to  enter  into  such  ques- 
tions of  detail;  and  I  must  be  content,  as  to 
Mr.  Asquith's  general  views  about  culture,  to 
refer  readers  to  the  book  itself,  and  especially 
to  the  noble  passages  on  pages  25  and  69. 
Nothing  is  more  remarkable  about  these  ad- 
dresses than  the  apparently  effortless  way  in 
which  their  author  "  lifts  "  to  a  higher  level  of 
eloquence.  He  favours  the  sustained  perora- 
tion; but  his  perorations  grow  out  of,  are  all  of 
a  piece  with,  what  has  gone  before,  instead 
of  being  shamelessly  stuck  on  like  those  of  the 
wanton  rhetorician.  One  result  of  this,  how- 
ever, is  that  they  are  not  detachable:  one  al- 
ways wants  to  take  in  the  sentence  before,  so 
to  speak.  Instead  of  attempting  to  quote  them, 
therefore,  I  may  be  permited  to  pass  to 
a  few  remarks  upon  his  way  of  express- 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

ing     himself:    what,     vaguely,     we     call     his 
style. 

In  his  lecture  on  "  Culture  and  Character," 
Mr.  Asquith  refers  to  the  frequency  with  which 
"  a  man  takes  an  hour  to  say  what  might  have 
been  as  well  or  better  said  in  twenty  minutes, 
or  spreads  over  twenty  pages  what  could  easily 
have  been  exhausted  in  ten."  The  offence  of 
being  "  slipshod  and  prolix "  is  never  com- 
mitted by  him.  There  is  no  greater  living  mas- 
ter of  the  summary;  and  the  qualities  of  his 
speaking  are  present  in  his  writing.  He  sur- 
veys his  field  from  a  detached  eminence,  and 
sketches  its  main  outlines  with  precision  and  in 
their  due  proportions.  His  survey  is  so  simple 
and  straightforward  as  sometimes  to  appear  easy 
and  obvious;  but  a  man  who  should  succumb 
to  that  impression  might  be  recommended  to 
attempt  the  operation  for  himself.  The  cer- 
tainty with  which  Mr.  Asquith  grasps  his  gen- 
eral ideas  is  matched  by,  and  allied  to,  the 
lucidity  with  which  he  formulates  them.  No 
one,  I  might  add,  who  was  not  habituated  to 
accurate  expression  could,  when  occasion  calls, 
say  nothing  at  all  with  Mr.  Asquith's  ease  and 
safety.  His  verbal  instrument  is  the  perfect 
servant  of  his  mind.  It  is  indeed  difficult  for 
a  politician  to  retain  a  sound  style.  Whenever 
[88] 


MR.  ASQUITH  AS  AUTHOR 

he  rises  he  must  play  St.  Anthony  to  beckon- 
ing hosts  of  cliches;  and  according  to  his  tem- 
perament he  will  be  more  liable  to  yield  to  one 
bevy  or  the  other,  to  those  of  wooden  pomposity 
and  sham  dignity  or  to  those  of  intemperate 
rhetoric  and  sham  passion.  Mr.  Asquith,  as 
a  political  speaker,  has  been  known,  not  infre- 
quently, to  lapse  into  a  hollow  resonance,  and 
there  are  a  few  examples  of  this  pardonable  and 
almost  unavoidable  humbug  in  the  obituary 
speeches  printed  at  the  end  of  this  volume.  But 
as  a  speaker — or,  rather,  a  writer — on  other 
subjects  he  is  entirely  free  from  it;  and  his  style 
is  literally  a  model  of  its  kind. 

It  is  what  is  called  a  classical,  what  used  to 
be  called  a  "correct"  style:  the  style  natural 
to  a  man  of  his  intellect  and  temper.  His 
sentences  are  close-knit:  packed,  but  easy. 
Every  phrase  adds  something;  but  an  intract- 
able content  never  destroys  the  balance.  In 
the  Latinity  of  the  language,  in  the  structure 
of  the  sentences,  in  the  objectivity,  imperson- 
ality, of  the  writer's  attitude,  there  is  something 
reminiscent  of  the  eighteenth  century.  There 
are  constant  faint  traces  of  Johnson,  of  Burke, 
of  Gibbon.  We  observe  the  affectionate  use 
of  words  like  "  denigration  "  and  "  fuliginous  "; 
and  admirably  compendious  phrases  like  that 

[89] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

in  which,  referring  to  the  production  of  super- 
fluous biographies,  he  speaks  of  "  the  monu- 
ments which  filial  piety  or  misdirected  friend- 
ship is  constantly  raising  to  those  who  deserved 
and  probably  desired  to  be  forgotten."  One 
has  employed  the  word  "  affectionate " ;  and 
here,  of  course,  is  one  of  the  places  where  per- 
sonality does  come  in.  Marked  proclivities  in 
language  are  in  themselves  windows  into  per- 
sonality. And  in  these  addresses  Mr.  Asquith's 
individuality  peeps  out  in  all  sorts  of  ways: 
in  the  revelation  of  his  tastes,  in  the  warm 
mental  glow  which  saves  from  frigidity  the  most 
"  scientific  "  of  his  paragraphs,  and  in  his  fre- 
quent humour.  But  he  does  not  write  to  display 
his  powers  of  writing;  he  does  not  parade  his 
tastes  because  they  are  his  (announcing  them 
merely  because  they  appear  to  him  to  be  sen- 
sible and  reasonable) ;  and  he  does  not  jump 
over  the  hedge  for  any  joke  or  take  even  those 
which  stand  right  in  his  road  save  in  the  most 
delicate  and  undemonstrative  manner.  Many 
readers,  by  no  means  obtuse,  might  well  miss 
the  gentle  jest  in  his  address  to  the  Royal  So- 
ciety, which  was  founded  by  Charles  II.: 

'  Whether  the  interest  in  anatomy  displayed, 
as  your   annals   show,   by  the    Society   in   its 

[90] 


MR.  ASQUITH  AS  AUTHOR 

earliest  years  was  due  to  the  proclivities  of 
its  Royal  Patron,  I  do  not  know  ..." 

The  passage  on  the  uses  of  the  bastinado  and 
the  knout  in  criticism  might  also  be  quoted; 
and  the  charming  account  of  Jeremy  Bentham's 
variegated  evenings.  His  criticisms  and  apt 
images  are  all  the  more  enjoyable  because  of 
their  subservience  to  his  main  purpose:  his 
refusal  to  allow  the  garlands  to  conceal  the 
pillar.  And  one  must  mention  his  extraordi- 
narily happy  and  judicious  use  of  quotations. 
They  are  never  dragged  in  by  the  heels  to  dis- 
play learning  or  import  a  facile  colouring;  but 
the  few  he  makes,  both  from  English  and  from 
classical  authors,  are,  by  their  very  nature  and 
pertinence,  an  unmistakable  proof  of  large 
reserves.  His  temper,  almost  always,  is  ami- 
able. But  just  as  the  even  surface  of  his  lan- 
guage is  sometimes  abruptly  and  effectively 
broken  by  an  unusual  or  a  colloquial  word,  so 
his  pervasive,  easy  tolerance  now  and  then 
yields.  Something  hard  comes  into  sight,  like 
black  rocks  under  a  smooth  sea;  self-knowl- 
edge, determination,  a  settled,  though  usually 
concealed,  contempt  for  the  complacent  stupid, 
and  the  pretentious  superficial.  But  he  never 
loses  his  self-control. 

[91] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

It  would  be  easy  to  supplement  this  brief 
catalogue  of  some  of  Mr.  Asquith's  qualities 
with  a  list  of  the  qualities  which  he  does  not 
possess.  He  has  little,  no  doubt,  in  common 
with  Rousseau,  Shelley,  and  John  the  Baptist; 
like  the  rest  of  us,  he  is  something  and  not 
something  else.  But,  reading  this  too  slight 
collection,  one  remembers  the  superb  general- 
isation that  "  conference  maketh  a  ready  man, 
reading  a  full  man,  and  writing  an  exact  man  " ; 
and  one  feels  that  the  three  processes  have  here 
been  operating,  with  uniform  success,  in  one 
person. 


[92] 


THE  INFINITIVES  THAT 
WERE  SPLIT 

To  any  writer,  unless  he  be  a  morose  hermit, 
it  must  be  a  pleasure  to  receive  unsolicited  let- 
ters from  strangers.  I  myself — one  must  take 
one's  illustrations  from  the  nearest  available 
source — receive  such  letters  occasionally.  They 
are  as  varied  as  possible.  One  correspondent,  I 
remember,  asked  me  what  was  my  Christian 
name;  another  sent  me  a  flower  plucked  on 
the  slopes  of  Hymettus;  another,  having  seen 
me  complain  that  I  had  vainly  tried  for  years 
to  secure  a  copy  of  the  Undertaker's  Journal, 
obtained  one  from  a  parishioner,  and  forwarded 
it  with  a  letter  full  of  sinister  charm.  There 
are  letters  of  congratulation,  letters  of  abuse, 
letters  seeking  for  knowledge,  and  letters  (alas, 
too  many!)  pointing  out  ignorance.  They  all 
relieve  the  monotony  of  the  post.  All  are  wel- 
come; save  only  letters  which  deal  with  well- 
known  and  unobscure  points  of  grammar. 

Two  people  write  to  me  about  a  recent  essay 
in  this  series.  One  says  that  it  contained  A 

[93] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

SPLIT  INFINITIVE;  the  second  that  it  contained 
TWO  SPLIT  INFINITIVES.  The  first 
says  "  I  suppose  you  are  one  of  those  who  de- 
fend split  infinitives  " ;  the  second  assumes  that 
no  defence  is  possible.  We  can  start,  there- 
fore, with  the  fact  clear  that  there  are  two  sides 
and  two  parties  to  the  question.  There  are  some 
men  who  would  no  more  split  an  infinitive  than 
they  would  split  their  father's  head  with  an  axe, 
and  who,  when  anybody  else  splits  one,  split 
their  sides;  there  are  others  who,  on  occasion, 
will  as  cheerfully  split  an  infinitive  as  a 
soda. 

Far  be  it  from  me  to  any  longer  than  I  am 
bound  to  dwell  on  a  subject  about  which  people 
are  apt  to  so  violently  differ.  But  it  is,  I  feel, 
my  duty  to  briefly  confess  that  there  frequently 
are  places  in  which  splitting  an  infinitive  secures 
an  additional  emphasis  which  could  not  be 
secured  without  the  split,  and  places  in  which 
an  infinitive  that  is  not  split  makes  one  at  once 
conscious  that  the  author  has  tried  to,  at  all 
costs,  avoid  a  split  infinitive  with  the  result 
that  his  expression  seems  strained. 

I  seldom  split  an  infinitive.  When  I  do  I 
shall  not  feel  called  upon  to  explain  why  I  do. 
But  I  am  not  content  to  leave  the  subject  at 
that.  For  it  has  made  me  aware  of  something 

[94] 


SPLIT  INFINITIVES 

about  which,  however  generally  it  may  be  ex- 
perienced, I  do  not  feel  altogether  easy.  It 
has  suddenly  occurred  to  me  that  although  I 
do  not  often  perpetrate  a  spilt  infinitive,  I  am 
often  on  the  verge  of  doing  so.  I  write  down, 
in  the  first  ardent  flight  of  my  fancy,  some 
phrase  like  "  to  altogether  condemn "  or  "  to 
exactly  express,"  and  then  I  go  back  and  alter 
it  into  "  altogether  to  condemn  "  or  "  exactly 
to  express."  I  now  know  that  when  I  do  this 
I  do  not  do  it  because  I  think  it  right 
to  do  so,  or  because  I  think  that  in  all 
cases  the  undivided,  unseparated,  indissolute, 
integral  infinitive  is  the  more  elegant.  I 
do  it  out  of  sheer  cowardice.  I  am  in 
fear  of  the  pedants.  I  am  (which  is  quite  a 
good  reason)  bored  by  the  prospect  of  getting 
letters  asking  for  an  explanation,  and  I  am 
(which  is  not  a  good  reason)  cowardly  afraid 
of  seeming  not  to  know  that  infinitives  ought 
not  to  be  split  or  not  to  have  the  taste,  the  ear, 
to  detect  one  when  I  write  it.  And,  realising 
this,  I  realise  that  there  are  all  sorts  of  other 
alterations  that  I  make  in  the  same  pusillani- 
mous and  unnatural  way. 

Is  any  of  us  natural?  Is  there  one  who  in- 
variably writes  impeccable  English  at  first  go 
off?  Is  there  one  who,  if  he  does  not,  has  the 

[95] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

courage  to  let  his  first  fine  careless  raptures 
stand?  I  doubt  it.  Since  I  first  got  fascinated 
by  this  topic  I  have  asked  five  or  six  of  the 
most  scrupulous  and  respected  writers  of  Eng- 
lish alive  what  is  their  practice.  Accepting  no 
evasions,  I  have  discovered  that  every  one  of 
them  habitually  alters  things  after  he  has  written 
them.  I  am  not  referring  to  alterations  made 
for  the  sake  of  obvious  improvement,  strengthen- 
ing of  epithet,  or  clarifications  of  phrase;  I 
am  referring  merely  to  alterations  which  turn 
something  colloquial  and  natural  into  something 
artificial  and  grammatical  which  will  stand  the 
scrutiny  of  the  lynx-eyed  gentlemen  of  leisure 
who  seem  to  have  nothing  better  to  do  than  to 
look  for  specks  in  the  suns  of  literature:  errors, 
easy  of  commission,  but  indefensible  by  the 
rules. 

The  split  infinitive  is  only  one  thing  in  a 
large  category.  There  is  "  that "  and  "  which  " 
and  "  who " ;  they  are  continually  being  ex- 
changed because  one  or  other  of  them,  although 
the  meaning  is  quite  clear,  looks  a  little  wrong 
where  it  is  put.  There  is  "  who  "  and  "  whom." 
How  often  have  I,  how  often  have  Dickens, 
Wordsworth,  Milton,  and  Shakespeare  (Homer 
was  a  Greek,  and  so  eluded  the  difficulty)  been 
bothered  by  the  necessity  of  dealing  rightly  with 

[96] 


SPLIT  INFINITIVES 

these  preposterous  pronouns,  revising  sentences 
in  which  they  occur,  saying  to  ourselves 
"  Bother "  (or,  in  the  cases  of  Wordsworth 
and  Milton,  "Damn")  "it  all,  is  this  the 
nominative  after  the  verb  *  to  be,'  or  the  accusa- 
tive after  a  transitive  verb,  or  what  else? " 
"Who  did  you  see?"  we  (Shakespeare,  etc.) 
write.  The  spectres  of  all  the  grammarians 
in  the  world  rise  before  us  as  we  write;  we 
weakly  go  back  and  put  an  "  m "  after  the 
"who";  an  "  m  "  which  we  may  scatter  indis- 
criminately about  our  conversation  without 
knowing  or  caring  whether  we  always  have  it 
in  the  right  places. 

Some  of  us  (Shakespeare  and  Milton,  but 
not  so  much  myself  in  this  instance)  write 
down  "  It  is  me,"  or  "  It  was  him."  The  same 
ghostly  battalion  emerges  like  vapour  from  the 
soil;  the  author  looks  uneasily  over  his  shoulder 
and,  with  a  twisted  smile,  substitutes  "It  is  I " 
or  "  It  was  he."  Accuracy  has  been  secured 
at  the  cost  of  naturalness;  Cerberus  has  had 
his  sop ;  the  mouths  of  the  pedants  are  stopped, 
and  their  tongues  will  not  wag.  There  is  an- 
other thing  still  worse:  the  obligation  of  "fol- 
lowing up "  pronouns  of  alternative  gender. 
You  find  you  have  to  write,  for  example, 
a  sentence  such  as 

[97] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

"  The  story  as  told  by  Mr.  (Mrs.  or  Miss) 
Jones  does  great  credit  to  his,  or  her,  powers 
of  narration.  He,  or  she,  has  a  very  flexible 
style;  and  his,  or  her,  sense  of  humour  is  often 
considerably  more  in  evidence  than  his,  or  her, 
respect  of  persons." 

That  is  what  you  finally  evolve.  But  your 
first  impulse  was  ("their"  having  been  re- 
jected as  hopeless,  since  there  is  only  one 
author)  to  write  "  his  "  all  the  way,  and  let  the 
alternative  "  her "  be  understood.  But  you 
did  not  dare.  You  had  not  the  courage.  You 
were  afraid  that  if  you  did,  somebody  would 
think  you  were  slipshod,  or  somebody  else  would 
think  you  had  not  noticed  that  you  had  brought 
the  feminine  in  at  the  beginning,  or  (worst  of 
all)  that  somebody  else  would  think  you  were 
unaware  of  the  fact  that  you  cannot  use  the 
masculine  possessive  of  a  feminine  possessor. 
Your  sentence,  in  its  final  and  highly  gram- 
matical form,  is  just  as  ugly  and  awkward  as 
it  would  have  been  had  you  left  it  as  it  was* 
But  your  reputation  for  knowing  all  about  the 
King's  English  is  saved;  and  you  feel  that 
though  they  may  call  you  foolish,  dull,  biased, 
tasteless,  old-fashioned,  decadent,  or  profligate, 
though  they  may  suspect  you  of  forging 

[98] 


SPLIT  INFINITIVES 

cheques,  of  secret  cannibalism,  of  garrotting,  or 
of  addiction  to  heroin  or  cocaine,  they  will  at 
least  not  be  able  to  direct  against  you  the  far 
more  cutting  and  humiliating  charge  of  being 
ungrammatical. 

Ought  writers  so  to  contort  themselves  (note 
how  I  have  avoided  the  split  by  putting  that 
"so"  before  that  "to")  for  such  reasons? 
Ought  they  not  rather,  assuming  them  to  be 
knowledgeable  people  and  people  with  a  respect 
for  the  language  which  they  are  handling,  to 
be  brave  enough  to  stand  by  phraseology  which 
they  use  daily  in  speech,  and  which  only  by 
slow  and  laborious  effort  they  can  avoid  in 
print?  I  am  sure  they  ought.  But  though  I 
still  cling  to  a  belief  in  the  occasional  split 
infinitive,  I  fear  I  shall  not  often  have  the 
courage  to  act  up  to  my  faith.  I  have  never  yet 
gone  to  the  lengths  of  the  precise  London  house- 
holder who  has  on  his  door  "  Do  not  ring  unless 
an  answer  be  required."  But  the  "  Constant 
Reader,"  so  far  as  I  am  concerned,  will  always 
retain  his  power.  But  if,  widening  his  scope,  he 
goes  off  grammatical  errors  into  stock  quota- 
tions and  cliches  (which  are  certainly  at  least 
as  reprehensible)  almost  the  whole  British  Press 
will  go  out  of  business. 

[99] 


DR.  JOHNSON 

MR.  S.  C.  ROBERTS  has  compiled,  the  Cam- 
bridge University  Press  have  published,  and  I 
have  just  read,  a  small  book  called  The  Story 
of  Doctor  Johnson.  It  is  virtually  an  introduc- 
tion to  Boswell.  It  is  ostensibly  intended  for 
children,  but  I  think  that  there  are  some  mil- 
lions of  white  adults  who  might  profitably  read 
it.  For  Boswell's  Life,  though  we  are  all  sup- 
posed to  have  read  it,  is,  as  a  fact,  by  many 
people  taken  for  granted.  They  presume  them- 
selves to  have  read  it,  just  as  they  presume 
themselves  to  be  familiar  with  the  Bible,  and  if 
confronted  with  a  question  about  Langton  or 
Dr.  Taylor  or  Topham  Beauclerk  they  are  as 
stuck  as  if  they  were  catechised  about  Amos, 
Habakkuk,  or  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians. 
And  even  if  they  are  conscious,  and  willing  to 
assert,  that  they  have  never  opened  Boswell, 
they  are  usually  unaware  of  the  value  of  what 
they  missed.  They  think  they  know  Johnson; 
but  they  do  not. 

Most  men  who  are  not  illiterate  moujiks  have 
[100] 


DR.  JOHNSON 

some  conception  of  Dr.  Johnson's  personality 
and  opinions.  They  are  familiar  with  the  late 
Reynolds  portrait;  the  wig,  the  lumbering 
shoulders  and  chest,  the  puffy  eyes,  fat,  seamed 
face,  loose  but  obstinate  mouth.  They  prob- 
ably supplement  the  picture  with  printed  de- 
scriptions, taken  from  Macaulay  or  elsewhere, 
of  his  stature  and  gait,  his  loud  laugh,  his 
domineering  habit  in  conversation,  his  gross 
table  manners,  his  dislike  of  clean  linen,  and 
his  unpleasing  custom  of  smearing  gravy  and 
potatoes  over  his  clothes.  They  have  heard 
typical  sayings.  He  jeered  perpetually  at  the 
aspiring  and  hungry  Scot.  He  said  that  pa- 
triotism was  the  last  refuge  of  a  scoundrel;  that 
a  ship  was  a  floating  gaol;  and  that,  when 
writing  Parliamentary  reports,  he  did  not  let 
the  Whig  dogs  have  the  best  of  it.  And,  for 
the  rest,  he  was  customarily  abusive,  answering 
questions  with  "  Sir,  that  is  a  very  silly  ques- 
tion," or  "  Then,  sir,  you  are  a  great  fool." 

That  is  the  sort  of  picture  of  Johnson  that 
lodges  in  the  brain  of  the  man  who  has  not 
read  Boswell;  for  the  man  who  has  not  read 
Boswell  is  not  likely  to  have  read  Sir  John 
Hawkins  or  Mrs.  Thrale.  That  it  should  exist, 
and  should  be  so  widely  dispersed,  is  proof  of 
the  force  and  weight  both  of  his  personality  and 

[101] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

of  Boswell's  unequalled  portrayal.  No  dead 
man  lives  so  widely  and  so  vividly;  even  Na- 
poleon is  a  more  shadowy — and  would,  if  he 
suddenly  appeared  at  a  tea-party,  be  a  less 
recognisable — figure.  But  the  popular  concep- 
tion is  wholly  inadequate.  It  does  not  account 
for  the  reverence  with  which  Johnson  is  by 
many  held,  the  tender  affection  which  many 
feel  for  him,  and  the  verdict  of  many  that, 
excepting  one  who  is  known  to  us  only  through 
his  works,  Samuel  Johnson  was  the  greatest  of 
all  Englishmen. 

He  who  knows  Bos  well,  though  he  never  look 
at  a  line  of  Johnson's  frequently  very  revealing 
and  entertaining  original  works,  knows  John- 
son outside  and  in.  He  knows  him  as  the  social 
figure,  the  Grub  Street  hack  of  early,  the  auto- 
cratic Great  Cham  of  later,  years;  the  diner- 
out  and  conversational  giant  who  was  the  model 
of  courtesy  to  women,  the  tyrannic  disputant 
with  men;  the  independent  theorist  who  often 
on  principle  deferred  to  rank  or  office,  but  never 
cringed  to  a  man.  He  knows  him  as  a  great  if 
erratic  scholar,  a  master  of  the  classic  languages 
from  childhood,  interested  in  all  human  affairs; 
the  learned  essayist  and  the  herculean  compiler 
who  produced  the  first,  and  still  almost  the  most 
interesting,  of  our  standard  dictionaries.  He 
[102] 


DR.  JOHNSON 

Allows  him  as  the  proud  and  independent  spirit 
who  answered  Chesterfield's  tardy  offer  of 
patronage  with  the  most  crushing  and  eloquent 
letter  in  the  language;  and  in  whose  character 
and  demeanour  no  change  of  circumstances 
made  the  least  difference.  But  he  knows  more; 
he  gets  below  isolated  phrases  and  acts  into 
something  deeper  in  which  those  were  rooted, 
and  of  which  they  were  sometimes  only  the 
fantastic  flowers.  He  knows  that  Johnson's 
character  was  one  of  the  noblest  and  his  mind 
one  of  the  sanest  and  most  powerful  of  which 
we  have  record. 

Johnson  was  habitually  dogmatic  and  fre- 
quently rude.  These  were  faults  if  you  like; 
but  the  noticeable  point  about  them  is  that  his 
friends  did  not  resent  them,  and  that  if  his 
verbal  brutality  hurt  a  super-sensitive  person 
he  always  regretted  it.  But  his  faults  were 
the  defects  of  his  qualities;  he  did  have  a  grasp 
of  things  such  as  few  men  have  had;  Burke 
was  content  to  receive  light  from  him  on  poli- 
tics and  Reynolds  on  painting.  The  prejudices 
which  are  so  characteristic  of  him  to  common 
thinking  did  exist;  but  he  was  a  humorist. 
Every  humorist  has  his  "  stunts,"  and  John- 
son's prejudices  about  Scotchmen  and  other 
bugbears  were  largely  deliberate  and  artificial, 

[103] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

kept  up  in  order  to  give  salt  to  life.  They 
were  not  ungovernable:  five  of  his  six  assistants 
on  the  dictionary  were  Scotch,  as  was  Boswell; 
and,  in  spite  of  his  remarks  about  Whigs  being 
rascals  and  republicans,  and  suitable  candidates 
for  transportation,  when  he  met  Wilkes  (who 
really  was  a  rascal)  at  dinner  he  talked  to  him 
with  great  spirit  and  amiability.  He  had  a 
habit  of  expressing  his  Toryism  in  extreme 
terms;  but  it  had,  as  almost  all  his  judgments 
on  all  subjects,  a  hard  basis  of  reasoning  tem- 
pered by  common  sense,  which  is  often  beyond 
reason.  His  Jacobitism,  if  it  was  hardly  a 
joke,  was,  at  all  events,  little  more  than  a 
symbol;  he  was  not  the  man  to  worship  shib- 
boleths. He  was  not  without  sympathy  with 
the  generous  parts  of  eighteenth-century  Radi- 
calism; and  if  he  was  strongly  anti-revolutionist, 
it  was  not  because  he  was  deliberately  biased  or 
had  vested  interests,  but  because,  with  his  read- 
ing of  history  and  human  nature,  he  formed 
the  conclusion  that  the  necessity  in  his  day  was 
to  insist  on  that  need  for  "  subordination  "  which 
so  strongly  impressed  his  mind.  Other  men 
differed;  but  he  could,  when  he  liked,  put  up  a 
remarkably  powerful  case  for  any  belief  he  held ; 
and  even  those  who  share  none  of  his  beliefs 
may  well  withhold  condemnation  of  the  Tory 
[104] 


DR.  JOHNSON 

who  in  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century 
said  that  "  A  decent  provision  for  the  poor  is 
the  true  test  of  civilisation." 

Johnson,  as  a  politician  and  as  a  critic,  had, 
like  all  men,  his  limitations;  but  his  common 
sense  was  such  as  to  deserve  the  name  of 
genius,  and  he  continually  surprises  us  with 
flashes  of  the  profoundest  insight.  For  behind 
his  common-sense  practicality  was  a  troubled, 
suffering  spirit  to  which  all  faiths  and  all  doubts 
were  known,  all  arguments,  all  fears,  and  all 
hopes  presented  themselves.  The  lumbering 
great  "  argufy er  "  and  wag  was  fundamentally 
a  man  with  a  strong  imagination  and  a  large 
heart.  He  had  a  horror  of  death,  and  fought 
with  it.  He  wrestled  nightly  with  his  besetting 
sins,  chiefly  that  of  indolence.  Some  of  the 
prayers  he  wrote  for  himself  bite  very  deep. 
He  detested  sentimental  talk,  but  now  and  again 
the  strength  of  his  emotions  broke  through  the 
crust,  and  a  friend  would  realise  the  depth  of 
his  affection  for  mother  or  wife,  or  one  of  the 
helpless  dependents  with  whom  he  constantly 
saddled  himself.  He  was  intolerant  of  pre- 
sumptuous fools,  rough  with  those  who  differed 
from  him;  nevertheless,  he  was  one  of  the  most 
generous,  affectionate,  and  natural  of  men,  and 
one  of  the  most  courageous.  He  said,  years 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

afterwards,  that  he  and  Dick  Savage,  having 
no  money  for  beds,  once  spent  the  night  trudg- 
ing round  St.  James's  Square.  They  canvassed 
heaven,  earth,  and  their  woes;  and  in  the  end 
agreed  "  to  stand  by  their  country." 

He  related  it  as  a  pathetic  jest;  but  hardly, 
one  imagines,  without  justifiable  pride.  For 
then,  as  always,  he  was  consciously  resolved 
not  to  let  his  personal  distresses  warp  his  judg- 
ments or  distort  his  ideas  of  good  and  evil. 
The  need  for  "  clearing  our  minds  of  cant  "  and 
the  other  need  of  fighting  the  fears  in  our  minds 
and  the  menaces  of  circumstance,  are  the  two 
outstanding  "  lessons " — if  one  may  use  the 
word — that  are  driven  home  by  his  biography; 
and  any  child  or  adult  who  is  led  to  Bos  well 
by  Mr.  Roberts's  ingenious  and  well-illustrated 
manual  must,  I  conceive,  benefit  morally,  as 
well  as  being  entertained  as  he  will  seldom  be 
in  a  normal  life. 


[106] 


A  PUZZLE 

I  THINK,  but  I  may  be  in  error,  that  George 
Meredith  himself  requested  that  there  should  be 
no  "  official  life  "  of  himself.  Certainly  such  a 
veto  would  be  natural  in  him,  for  he  was,  save 
under  the  veil  of  fiction,  secretive  about  large 
portions  of  his  experience.  The  life  recently 
published  (George  Meredith,  by  S.  M.  Ellis) 
is,  however,  by  a  cousin  of  his,  and  some  of  the 
material  included  appears  with  the  permission 
of  his  son;  it  may,  therefore,  be  regarded  as 
being  as  near  an  intimate  life  as  anything  we  are 
likely  to  get. 

It  is  not  a  very  good  book.  The  author's 
English  is  not  of  the  first  order;  and  a  great 
deal  of  space  is  taken  up  with  quotations — many 
of  which  are  superfluous — from  Meredith's 
works.  All  the  industry  that  has  obviously  been 
lavished  on  it  has  failed  to  disinter  any  informa- 
tion about  several  of  his  early  years,  and  it  is 
in  large  measure  a  compilation  from  letters  and 
the  published  remarks  of  Meredith's  critics  and 
friends.  But  what  Meredith  did  in  his  seven- 

[107] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

teenth  year — when  he  can  only  be  presumed  to 
have  been  in  London — does  not  seriously  mat- 
ter; and  there  is  no  need  to  complain  that  the 
"  new  facts  "  produced  are  not  more  exhaustive. 
My  complaint  is  that  after  reading  this  book,  as 
after  reading  Meredith's  novels  and  poems,  I 
still  do  not  know  Meredith,  am  still  puzzled  by 
him,  and  am  still  (I  admit  it  with  all  diffidence) 
irritated  by  him.  That  I,  an  individual,  feel 
like  this  about  a  man  held  by  many  to  be  great 
and  good  could  interest  no  one  but  myself;  but 
I  know  that  both  my  bewilderment  and  my  irri- 
tation are  shared  by  others. 

I  have  often  asked  people,  very  catholic  in 
their  tastes,  why  they  did  not  like  Meredith: 
I  have  never  got  a  satisfactory  explanation  yet. 
There  are  a  few  actions  in  his  life  at  which  posi- 
tive blame  has  been  levelled.  He  apparently 
treated  his  first  wife  very  badly  when,  in  her 
last  illness,  he  refused  to  go  to  see  her.  He 
quarrelled  with  his  father  and  he  quarrelled 
with  his  eldest  son.  His  refusal  to  see  either 
wife  or  son  on  their  death-beds  is  here  half  ex- 
cused by  his  shrinking  from  sickness  and  death: 
one  can  only  say  that  the  facts  are  not  complete 
enough  to  enable  one  to  form  a  judgment  either 
way.  During  his  three  years  of  journalism  he 
wrote,  for  a  Conservative  paper,  violent  attacks 
[108] 


A  PUZZLE 

upon  the  North,  Lincoln,  and  John  Bright,  al- 
though his  personal  opinions  were  the  opposite 
of  those  of  the  paper.  He  annoyed  many  peo- 
ple by  his  exaggerated  secretiveness  about  his 
parentage  and  the  place  of  his  birth  (which  he 
would  never  give  properly,  even  in  a  work  of 
reference) ;  ten  years  after  his  marriage  one  of 
his  close  friends  was  merely  guessing  that  he  had 
been  married.  But  people  feel  a  certain  remote- 
ness from  him  who  are  unaware  of  all  this;  I 
know  I  always  did  myself.  It  is  hard  to  define. 
Even  "  distaste  "  seems  too  strong  a  word  for 
the  feeling  and  the  image  used  by  Henry  James 
who,  when  looking  for  something  wrong  about 
d'Annunzio,  compared  himself  to  the  plumber 
searching  a  house  for  the  source  of  a  bad  smell, 
comes  into  one's  mind  only  to  be  dismissed. 
What  is  the  characteristic  that  repels? 

Those  who  have  called  him  a  snob  because  he 
insisted  on  writing  about  leisured  Olympians 
and  never  mentioned  the  Portsmouth  shop  are 
superficial  on  the  first  point  and  demonstrably 
wrong  on  the  second;  for,  in  a  novel,  he  ex- 
pounded his  family  history  without  taking  the 
slightest  pains  to  avoid  identification.  In  any 
event  it  is  not  a  defect  of  that  sort  one  is  look- 
ing for,  but  something  far  deeper  and  more  per- 
vasive, a  streak  which  gives  a  tone  to  everything 

[109] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

he  wrote  and  all  that  is  recorded  of  him.  What 
was  his  character,  one  wonders?  Was  he  a 
mind,  tastes,  a  temper,  without  deep  generous 
affections  ?  How  can  one  ask  that  of  a  man  who 
expressed  himself  so  profusely?  Is  not  the 
reason  that  he  concealed  himself  behind  a  mask? 
What  was  there  behind  the  mask?  Worse  ques- 
tion of  all,  was  there  anything  behind  the  mask? 
So  one  question  leads  to  another!  One  thinks 
of  him  as  a  pretender,  a  poser,  a  man  who  could 
not  be  himself.  One  links  up  his  personal  se- 
cretiveness  with  the  abominable  artificialities  of 
his  style.  These  appear  early.  At  twenty-one 
he  writes  of  a  poem  to  the  publisher  "  It  was 
written  immediately  on  receipt  of  the  intelli- 
gence which  it  chaunts " ;  and  one  feels  that 
some  common  word  had  been  struck  out  and  the 
exotic  word  put  in;  a  method  of  procedure 
habitual  to  him  when  he  wrote  poems.  One 
reflects  on  the  thinness  of  the  so-called  philoso- 
phy which  has  deluded  many  simple  people  by 
the  pretentiousness  with  which  he  covered  up  the 
triteness  of  his  earth-worship  in  difficult  jargon. 
One  remembers  his  most-quoted  mots;  the  thin- 
concealed  platitudinousness  of  the  statement 
(how  on  earth  do  critics  persuade  themselves 
that  it  is  brilliantly  illuminating?)  about  man 
having  rounded  Seraglio  Point  but  not  yet  dou- 

[1 10] 


A  PUZZLE 

bled  Cape  Turk.  One  thinks  of  the  mounds  of 
tinsel  tropes,  not  images  smoking  from  the 
heated  imagination,  but  gauds  of  fancy  fabric- 
ated by  a  very  deft  hand.  One  remembers  his 
indefensible  obscurity.  The  obscurity  of  Blake 
was  that  of  the  stammering  visionary;  that  of 
Browning  was  sometimes  the  obscurity  of  care- 
lessness and  sometimes  that  of  over-rapid 
thought,  but  there  was  always  something  there. 
The  tortuous  difficulties  of  Meredith  are  made 
up  like  the  maze  at  Hampton  Court,  and  when 
you  have  threaded  them  you  find  that  there  is 
nothing  there,  or  something  quite  simple,  like 
a  square  of  green  grass.  Look  at  the  Woods 
of  Westermain: 

Hither,  hither,  if  you  will, 
Drink  instruction,  or  instil, 
Run  the  woods  like  vernal  sap, 
Crying,  hail  to  luminousness ! 

But  have  care. 

In  yourself  may  lurk  the  trap 
On  conditions  they  caress. 
Here  you  meet  the  light  invoked, 
Here  is  never  secret  cloaked. 
Doubt  you  with  the  monster's  fry 
All  his  orbit  may  exclude; 
Are  you  of  the  stiff,  the  dry, 
Cursing  the  not  understood  ? 
Grasp  you  with  the  monster's  claws ; 
Govern  with  his  truncheon-saws ; 

[m] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Hate,  the  shadow  of  a  grain; 
You  are  lost  in  Westermain. 
Earthward  swoops  a  vulture  sun, 
Nighted  upon  carrion. 
Straightway  venom  wine-cups  shout 
Toasts  to  One  whose  eyes  are  out. 

The  man  who  is  not  annoyed  by  that  is  a  devo- 
tee indeed;  and  Carlyle  himself  never  equalled 
the  roundabout  artificialities  of  a  writer  who 
would  sprinkle  his  letters  with  made-up  perver- 
sions like  (I  take  the  first  to  hand)  "  I  am  now 
bather  anew  in  the  Pierian  Fount."  He  would 
always  write  "  fit  not "  instead  of  "  do  not  fit " 
or  "  Thank-song  "  instead  of  "  song  of  thanks- 
giving." A  vocabulary  or  an  order  used  by 
his  fellows  was  an  abomination  to  him.  Was  it 
that  he  was  in  perpetual  dread  of  thinness,  not 
merely  anxious  to  display,  but  positively  afraid 
to  be  himself  since  himself  was  not  a  good 
enough  thing  to  be  ?  And  even  when  that  is  ad- 
mitted, does  not  something  still  remain;  some- 
thing quite  positively  objectionable;  an  attitude 
towards  things,  and  especially  towards  women, 
which  one  can  only  vaguely  indicate  by  calling 
it  a  sort  of  refined  gloating? 

So  our  thoughts  proceed.  And  then  we  check ; 

realising  that  he  did  great  things  and  that  great 

men  found  him  great.    "  Not  an  artist,  oh,  not 

an  artist,"  said  Henry  James  to  a  friend,  "  but 

[112] 


A  PUZZLE 

he  did  the  best  things  best."  Part  at  least  of  a 
poet  was  in  him.  The  famous  things  come  into 
one's  mind:  the  scene  at  the  weir  in  Feverel, 
stanzas  of  Love  in  a  Valley,,  the  blossoming  tree 
in  The  Egoist,,  the  sonnet  on  Prince  Lucifer, 
and  passages  in  Modern  Love.  The  mystery 
and  the  bewilderment  return;  we  doubt  his  pow- 
ers but  admit  his  achievement,  we  call  him  con- 
noisseur and  poseur,  and  find  him  writing  of 
people  like  a  man  and  of  nature  like  an  enthu- 
siast. But  for  me,  I  tell  myself  this,  but  still 
I  find  that  I  am  not  in  contact  with  him,  that  I 
do  not  know  him,  that  I  do  not  relish  the  thought 
that  there  are  books  of  his  which  still  remain 
unread  by  me,  that  I  do  not  genuinely  like  him, 
and  that  when  I  find  that  after  his  death — he 
complained  continually  that  this  was  so  during 
his  life — the  large  public  still  refuses  to  read 
him,  I  am  not  surprised.  A  few  years  ago  a 
small  and  comparatively  cheap  edition-de-luxe 
of  his  poems  was  published.  Before  long,  though 
his  name  was  famous  and  nobody  denied  that 
he  had  written  some  beautiful  poetry,  the  book 
was  to  be  bought  cheap  as  a  remainder.  I  may 
be  confessing  my  limitations  in  saying  so,  and 
I  respect  some  of  Meredith's  warmest  admirers ; 
but  I  never  felt  more  genuinely  a  democrat  than 
when  that  book  failed. 


TOM  THUMB 

THE  American  nation — as  the  alcoholic  are 
now  learning — does  not  do  things  by  halves. 
Having  decided  to  "  prosecute  the  study "  of 
English  literature,  American  Universities  are 
producing  critical  monographs  and  exotic  re- 
prints at  a  pace  never  before  equalled.  Great 
stress  is  laid,  when  young  men  and  women  pro- 
duce theses  for  the  literary  doctorate,  upon  the 
need  for  tackling  new  subjects.  This  attitude, 
so  far  as  criticism  is  concerned,  has  led  to  an  ex- 
cessive pursuit  of  minutiae;  despairing  students 
have  to  invent  subjects  like  "  The  Colour  of  the 
Hair  of  Shakespeare's  Clowns  "  in  order  to  be 
certain  that  they  are  exploring  genuinely  un- 
traversed  ground.  But  the  passion  for  novelty 
shown  by  those  who  edit  texts  is  entirely  to  be 
commended.  It  is  much  more  interesting  and 
useful  to  dig  up  some  obscure  but  amusing  work 
and  annotate  it  than  to  produce  yet  one  more 
edition  of  Hamlet  or  Endymion.  During  the 
war,  American  editors  have  resuscitated  several 
good  neglected  poets,  such  as  Cleveland  and 


TOM  THUMB 

Lady  Winchilsea,  and  amongst  numerous  prose 
enterprises  there  have  been  several  editions  of 
minor  classics  of  the  eighteenth  century.  One 
is  a  competently  edited  reprint  of  both  versions 
of  Fielding's  Tom  Thumb  (The  Tragedy  of 
Tragedies),  by  Professor  James  T.  Hillhouse, 
published  in  this  country  by  the  Oxford  Univer- 
sity Press. 

Fielding's  most  amusing  play — the  very  name 
of  which  must  be  unfamiliar  to  most  readers  of 
Tom  Jones — was  written  when  he  was  twenty- 
four,  and  enlarged  shortly  after.  It  is  a  lam- 
poon on  the  heroic  verse  tragedy  produced  by 
Dryden  and  his  mouthing  successors;  and  the 
selection  of  the  fairy-tale  of  Tom  Thumb  (who 
is  the  bold  hero)  as  its  theme  well  illustrates  the 
extravagant  vigour  and  high  spirits  of  the  whole 
work.  Its  success  on  the  stage  showed  that  the 
London  public  was  ready  to  turn  away  from  the 
bombast  and  fustian  that  the  literati  had  palmed 
off  on  it;  the  range  of  careful  reading  attested 
both  by  its  text  and  by  Fielding's  solemn  foot- 
notes, prove  the  absurdity  of  the  common  legend 
that  in  his  youth  the  novelist  was  a  dissolute 
waster. 

The  work  is  so  good  that  even  one  who  had 
never  read  any  of  the  plays  parodied  would 
heartily  enjoy  it  and  at  the  same  time  realise 

[115] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

precisely  what  these  plays  must  have  been. 
Fielding's  humour  is  at  his  best  in  the  ironic 
preface,  where  he  professes  to  treat  the  play  as 
an  Elizabethan  relic  from  which  the  authors  he 
is  ridiculing  have  cribbed.  "  I  shall  ware,"  he 
adds,  "  at  present,  what  hath  caused  such  Feuds 
in  the  learned  World,  Whether  this  Piece  was 
originally  written  by  Shakespear,  tho'  certainly 
That,  were  it  true,  must  add  a  considerable 
Share  to  its  Merit;  especially,  with  such  who  are 
so  generous  as  to  buy  and  commend  what  they 
never  read,  from  an  implicit  Faith  in  the  Au- 
thor only:  A  Faith!  which  our  Age  abounds 
in  as  much,  as  it  can  be  called  deficient  in  any 
other."  There  follow  the  dramatis  personae. 
Amongst  them  are  King  Arthur,  "  A  passion- 
ate sort  of  King,  Husband  to  Queen  Dollalolla, 
of  whom  he  stands  a  little  in  Fear " ;  Tom 
Thumb  the  Great;  Merlin;  Noodle,  and  Doo- 
dle, "  Courtiers  in  Place,  and  consequently  of 
that  party  that  is  uppermost  ";  Parson,  "  of  the 
side  of  the  Church  " ;  Glumdalca,  Queen  of  the 
Giants,  who  is  in  love  with  Tom  Thumb;  and 
these  two: 

"Queen  Dollalolla,  Wife  to  King  Arthur,  and 
Mother   to    Huncamunca,    a   Woman    entirely 
faultless,   saving  that  she  is  a  little  given  to 
[116] 


TOM  THUMB 

Drink;  a  little  too  much  a  Virago  towards  her 
Husband,  and  in  Love  with  Tom  Thumb. 

"  The  Princess  Huncamunca.,  Daughter  to 
their  Majesties  King  Arthur  and  Queen  Dolla- 
lolla,  of  a  very  sweet,  gentle,  and  amorous  Dis- 
position, equally  in  love  with  Lord  Grizzle  and 
Tom  Thumb,  and  desirous  to  be  married  to 
both." 

The  minor  characters  are  stated  to  include 
"  Courtiers,  Guards,  Rebels,  Drums,  Trump- 
ets, Thunder,  and  Lightning." 

Three  extremely  strenuous  and  sanguinary 
acts  ensue:  intrigues,  wars,  assassinations.  The 
language  is  often  drawn  from  the  plays  paro- 
died: "extreme"  sentences  being  accumulated 
with  absurd  effect.  The  style  may  be  illus- 
trated by  the  Queen's  speech  when  she  first 
hears  that  her  daughter  is  going  to  marry  (she 
herself  is  in  love  with  him)  Tom  Thumb. 
Everyone  remembers  how,  in  the  fairy-tale,  Tom 
Thumb  narrowly  escaped  death  by  falling  into 
a  pudding  his  mother  was  making: 

Odsbobs !     I  have  a  mind  to  hang  myself, 
To  think  I  should  a  Grandmother  be  made 
By  such  a  Raskal — Sure  the  King  forgets 
When  in  a  Pudding,  by  his  Mother  put 
The  Bastard,  by  a  Tinker,  on  a  stile 

[i  17] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Was  drop'd — O,  good  Lord  Grizzle !  can  I  bear 
To  see  him  from  a  Pudding  mount  the  Throne? 
Or  can,  Oh  can!  my  Huncamunca  bear 
To  take  a  Pudding's  Offspring  to  her  Arms 

Which  reminds  one  of  the  lady  in  The  Import- 
ance of  Being  Earnest,  who  said  her  daughter 
should  not  "  contract  a  marriage  with  a  cloak- 
room and  enter  into  an  alliance  with  a  hand- 
bag." A  little  later  Huncamunca,  with  ludi- 
crous effect  and  a  reminiscence  of  Romeo  and 
Juliet,  cries: 

O   Tom   Thumb!   Tom   Thumb!   wherefore  art  thou   Tom 
Thumb, 

but  that  is  not,  as  a  single  line,  equal  in  effect 
to  the  end  of  Glumdalca's  passionate  outburst 
when  refused  by  Tom: 

I'm  all  within  a  Hurricane,  as  if 

The  World's  four  winds  were  pent  within  my  carcass, 

Confusion,  Horror,  Murder,  Guts,  and  Death. 

A  further  reminiscence  of  Shakespeare  occurs 
when  the  King,  at  the  dread  hour  of  night,  en- 
counters the  ghost  of  Tom  Thumb's  father. 
He  threatens  him: 

GHOST:     Threaten  others  with  that  Word, 

I  am  a  ghost,  and  am  already  dead. 

KING:       Ye  Stars!  'tis  well;  were  thy  last  Hour  to  come, 
This  Moment  had  been  it.  ... 

[118] 


TOM  THUMB 

In  the  end,  all  the  characters  kill  each  other. 
The  moral,  says  the  author,  is  not  less  excellent 
than  the  tale.  It  teaches  "  these  two  instructive 
lessons,  viz.,  That  Human  Happiness  is  exceed- 
ing transient,  and  that  Death  is  the  certain  end 
of  all  Men;  the  former  whereof  is  inculcated  by 
the  fatal  end  of  Tom  Thumb;  the  latter,  by  that 
of  all  the  other  personages." 

There  are  reasons — that  is  to  say,  there  is  a 
reason — why  Tom  Thumb  should  not  be  revived 
in  the  modern  theatre;  though  the  unshrinking 
Stage  Society  might  undertake  it.  But  though 
this  is  a  pity,  it  is  a  greater  pity  that  no  one  to- 
day writes  anything  like  it.  Fielding's  butts 
are  dead  and  gone.  The  plays  of  Young,  Banks, 
Nat  Lee,  Rowe,  are  unfamiliar  in  detail  even 
to  most  close  students  of  our  literature;  Jemmy 
Thomson's  great  tragedy  is  remembered  only 
by  the  immortal  line  "  O  Sophonisba,  Sopho- 
nisba  O,"  which  critics  (quite  justifiably)  copy 
out  of  each  other's  books  without  ever  referring 
to  the  original;  and  even  the  heroic  tragedies 
of  Dryden  himself  are  seldom  acted,  and  never, 
save  by  Professor  Saintsbury,  read.  But  con- 
temporary game  exists  at  which  the  writer  of 
burlesque  might  shoot  with  far  more  effect  and 
far  more  profit  to  his  audience. 

I  remember  nothing  of  the  kind  being  done 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

except  the  late  Mr.  Pelissier's  Potted  Plays. 
These,  though  delicious,  were  very  short  and 
paid  insufficient  attention  to  the  more  preten- 
tious kind  of  modern  plays  which,  like  the 
heroics  of  Fielding's  time,  are  taken  seriously 
by  intelligent  people.  The  epigrammatic  social 
comedy  derived  from  Wilde  is  common  enough 
to  be  effectively  lampooned;  so  is  the  drab 
bourgeois  play  descended  from  Ibsen;  so  is 
the  rural  drama,  English,  Scotch,  Welsh,  and 
Irish,  of  which  the  type,  and  the  most  successful, 
is  Mr.  Marsefield's  Nan;  so  is  the  industrial 
play  in  which  the  hard  business  magnate  is 
at  daggers  drawn  with  his  employees  and  his 
rebellious  progeny.  Parody  on  the  stage  is  a 
neglected  art;  but  this  does  not  necessarily 
imply  that  there  is  no  public  for  it.  And  the 
easiest  and  most  popular  thing  of  all  to  do 
would  be  a  musical  comedy,  in  which  music, 
sentiment,  and  jokes  should  all  burlesque  the 
stuff  we  have  been  given  for  the  last  twenty 
years. 


[120] 


SIDELIGHTS  ON  THE 
VICTORIANS 

"  BUST  by  Woolner."  This  phrase  is  familiar 
enough  in  catalogues  and  guide-books,  but  very 
few  people  know  who  Woolner  was  or  what 
sort  of  person  he  was.  Nevertheless,  Woolner 
was  one  of  the  original  seven  members  of  the 
Pre-Raphaelite  brotherhood.  As  such  he  must 
necessarily  be  of  some  interest  to  the  historian 
of  nineteenth-century  art.  And  I  opened  his 
long-delayed  Biography  (Thomas  Woolner,  His 
Life  in  Letters,  Chapman  and  Hall)  in  the 
expectation  of  learning  something  new  about 
the  Victorian  era.  By  something  new  I  do  not 
mean  something  really  surprising:  such  as  that 
the  great  Victorians  had  blue  beards  or  walked 
on  their  heads.  What  I  mean  is  that  I  expected 
something  more  than  the  tiny  driblet  of  un- 
known letters  that  we  usually  get  in  a  book 
published  so  long  after  the  event  as  is  this 
one.  I  have  not  been  disappointed.  Woolner's 
daughter  has  had  the  extremely  sensible  idea 
of  giving  us  an  idea  of  his  life  through  the  let- 

[121] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

ters  he  wrote  and  received,  instead  of  telling  us 
in  the  first  person,  and  at  prodigious  length, 
what  her  father  said  to  her  mother  at  breakfast 
on  November  22,  1870,  and  recording  at  length 
the  births,  careers,  deaths,  and  tombstones  of 
the  various  dogs  he  owned  in  his  life.  Wool- 
ner  corresponded  with  many  of  the  most  emi- 
nent men  of  his  time.  His  most  profuse 
correspondent  was  Mrs.  Tennyson — whose  hus- 
band, usually  referred  to  here  as  the  Bard,  was 
evidently  too  lazy  to  write  letters  himself — 
and  amongst  the  others  were  Rossetti,  Coventry 
Patmore,  Carlyle,  Mrs.  Carlyle,  Vernon  Lush- 
ington  and  others  of  the  Pre-Raphaelite  and 
Tennysonian  sets.  The  book  is  a  sort  of  tail- 
piece to  the  existing  literature  of  the  period, 
and  all  future  writers  about  the  Victorian  age 
or  its  principal  figures  will  find  something  in 
it  which  they  will  have  to  quote.  It  is  a  notice- 
able thing — and  one  that  throws  a  genial  light 
upon  Woolner's  character — that  almost  all  the 
hundreds  of  letters  given  are  familiar  and 
homely  in  tone.  There  are  very  few  rhapsodies 
and  there  is  very  little  fine  writing;  when  com- 
municating with  Woolner  people  did  not  pour 
out  their  inmost  souls,  but,  on  the  other  hand, 
they  refrained  from  anything  forced  or  in  the 
nature  of  humbug.  The  book  as  a  whole,  there- 
[122] 


SIDELIGHTS  ON  THE  VICTORIANS 

fore,  though  uninspiring  is  amusing  throughout. 
Woolner  was  born  in  1825  and  died  in  1892. 
In  his  early  years  he  was  the  friend  of  Rossetti, 
at  his  death  he  was  an  honorary  member  of  a 
City  Company.  So  it  is  to  be  expected  that 
his  early  correspondence  would  be  more  inter- 
esting than  his  later,  and  the  expectation  is 
fulfilled.  Especially  good  are  the  letters  he 
received  from  Rossetti  when,  having  despaired 
of  earning  his  living  as  a  sculptor,  he  was  seek- 
ing his  fortune  in  the  gold  fields  of  Australia. 
Later  disciples  of  the  Pre-Raphaelites  tended 
rather  to  forget  that  the  Pre-Raphaelites  were 
the  most  robust  of  men.  The  apparent  discord- 
ance between  their  characters  and  their  works 
is  not  difficult  to  explain.  They  were  artists, 
they  were  living  in  a  smug,  materialistic  world 
which  ignored  the  finer  impulses  of  the  spirit, 
and  they  went  to  extremes.  It  might  almost  be 
said  that  since  the  world  around  them  thought 
of  nothing  but  money,  they  deliberately  painted 
and  wrote  about  people  who  could  not  con- 
ceivably earn  their  livings,  and  because  they 
saw  around  them  a  generation  peculiarly  gross 
and  bustling  they  were  forced  into  the  extrava- 
gance of  creating  ideal  figures  who  might  be 
deemed  incapable  of  eating,  and  who  in  no 
circumstances  could  be  conceived  of  as  jump- 

[123] 


ing  a  five-barred  gate.  But  the  languorous 
and  swan-necked  women  of  Rossetti,  the  attenu- 
ated, almost  transparent,  princesses  of  Burne 
Jones,  the  gentle  Utopians  of  William  Morris, 
were  merely  the  escapes,  as  it  were,  of  full 
natures  starved  in  actual  life.  Burne  Jones 
was  one  of  the  wittiest  and  j  oiliest  talkers  of 
the  nineteenth  century,  and  filled  his  letters 
with  uncomplimentary  caricatures  of  himself. 
The  most  characteristic  story  about  William 
Morris  is  that  which  records  the  horror  of  a 
high  ecclesiastic  who,  after  standing  a  quarter 
of  an  hour  in  the  poet's  waiting-room,  heard  a 
loud  voice  come  down  the  stairs :  "  Now  send 
up  that  bloody  bishop."  Rossetti,  until  he  took 
to  drugs,  was  another  of  the  same  mould;  and 
it  gives  one  peculiar  pleasure  to  find  from 
Woolner's  biography  that,  even  at  the  begin- 
ning, when  the  Pre-Raphaelites  stood  to  gain 
everything  from  the  commendation  of  so  cele- 
brated a  man,  Rossetti  could  not  stand  the 
humbug  of  that  pompous  though  well-meaning 
pontiff,  John  Ruskin.  "  As,"  he  writes,  "  he  is 
only  half  informed  about  art,  anything  he  says 
in  favour  of  one's  work  is,  of  course,  sure  to 
prove  invaluable  in  a  professional  way."  Then 
very  shortly  afterwards  Woolner  subjoins  the 
following  remarks: 


SIDELIGHTS  ON  THE  VICTORIANS 

"  I  should  like  Ruskin  to  know  what  he  never 
knew — the  want  of  money  for  a  year  or  two; 
then  he  might  come  to  doubt  his  infallibility 
and  give  an  artist  working  on  the  right  road 
the  benefit  of  any  little  doubt  that  might  arise. 
The  little  despot  imagines  himself  the  Pope 
of  Art,  and  would  wear  3  crowns  as  a  right, 
only  they  might  make  him  look  funny  in 
London! " 

Add  to  this  Rossetti's  description  of  his  own 
early  and  much  photogravured  Annunciation 
as  "  my  white  abomination,"  and  the  gentle- 
man who  bought  it  as  "  an  Irish  maniac,"  and 
we  get  a  fairly  good  indication  of  the  essential 
healthiness  of  the  Pre-Raphaelite  movement. 

All  through  the  book  there  are  supplementary 
scraps  for  the  biographers.  In  1857  Woolner 
wrote  to  Mrs.  Tennyson: 

"  I  was  grieved  to  hear  the  death  of  Mr.  Bar- 
rett, not  on  the  old  gentleman's  account,  but 
because  I  know  the  distress  it  will  occasion  to 
poor  Mrs.  Browning,  who  quite  worshipped  the 
old  man,  however  unworthy  of  it  he  was.  He 
never  would  be  reconciled  to  her  after  her  mar- 
riage, but  adopted  the  somewhat  odd  plan  of 
hating  her  for  the  deed.  Poor  Mrs.  Browning 
bribed  the  butler  to  let  her  father's  dining- 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

room  blind  remain  up  a  little  way  that  she 
might  obtain  one  glimpse  of  him  from  the 
street  before  she  started  for  Florence.  She  was 
so  weak  the  poor  little  creature  had  to  hold  on 
by  area  rails  while  she  looked  her  last  at  her 
cruel  father,  then  went  home  and  spent  the 
evening  in  crying. 

"  Another  of  the  old  gentleman's  whims  was 
not  to  allow  either  of  his  sons  to  learn  any 
business  or  profession." 

There  is  a  very  typical  letter  from  Carlyle 
(1864)  beginning: 

"  DEAR  WOOLNER — I  at  once  sign  and  re- 
turn:— I  would  even  walk  in  suppliant  proces- 
sion to  the  Hon.  House  (if  necessary)  bare- 
headed and  in  sackcloth  and  ashes,  entreating 
said  Hon.  Long-eared  Assembly  to  deliver  us 
from  that  most  absurd  of  all  Farce-Tragedies 
daily  played  under  their  supervision." 

The  House  of  Commons  we  have  always  with 
us.  That  some  politicians  have  their  feelings 
is,  however,  shown  in  the  story  about  Mr. 
Gladstone  and  "  Granny "  Granville  weeping, 
in  unison,  over  one  of  Tennyson's  Idylls.  This 
subject  is  suitable  for  the  pencil  of  Mr.  Max 
Beerbohm,  as  is  also  that  other  description, 


SIDELIGHTS  ON  THE  VICTORIANS 

given  in  a  letter  from  the  present  Lord  Tenny- 
son (then  a  child)  of  The  Bard  painting  a 
summer-house.  He  did  it,  we  are  assured,  "  all 
by  himself."  The  best  story  in  the  book,  how- 
ever, concerns  a  notability  whose  name  is,  un- 
fortunately, not  given.  He  took  the  sculptor's 
wife  in  to  dinner  and  almost  completely  ignored 
her.  After  dinner,  in  the  drawing-room,  he 
came  up  to  her  and  said:  "Mrs.  Woolner,  if  I 
had  known  who  you  were,  I  should  have  paid 
you  more  attention."  Can  it  have  been  Sir 
Willoughby  Patterne? 

But  what  of  Woolner?  The  truth  is  I  have 
been  shirking  him.  He  was  evidently  the  friend 
of  great  men,  and  himself  a  model  of  all  the 
virtues.  He  could  certainly  make  good  busts, 
and  his  early  portraits  of  Tennyson — before 
the  poet  became  a  prophet  and  covered  his 
beautiful  mouth  and  chin  with  a  Pentateuchal 
beard — are  masterly.  Some  of  the  best  are 
reproduced  in  this  volume:  of  Sidgwick  and 
Cardinal  Newman  no  stronger  or  more  in- 
formative portraits  exist  than  Woolner's.  But 
busts  are  one  thing.  Imaginative  sculpture  is 
another.  Woolner,  with  something  interesting 
before  him,  could  see  what  was  there  and  model 
what  he  saw,  though  he  usually  began  prettify- 
ing when  he  was  doing  a  medallion — which  he 

[127] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

always,  irritatingly,  called  a  "  med."  Genuine 
creative  faculty  he  had  none:  no  powerful 
thoughts  or  passions  insisting  on  expression: 
nothing  more  than  a  taste  for  the  drooping,  and 
a  mild  affection  for  the  softer  virtues.  His 
statues  of  blind  boys,  bluecoat  boys,  Heavenly 
Welcome,  Achilles  shouting  from  the  Trenches, 
Feeding  the  Hungry,  Lady  Godiva,  and  (a 
bad  one)  The  Housemaid,  are  not  Pre- 
Raphaelitism,  nor  anything  else  except  sheer 
undiluted,  uninspired,  smooth,  sentimental,  de- 
generate Victorian  descendants  of  Flaxman. 
Mr.  Dombey  might  have  bought  any  of  them 
in  his  softer  moments,  and  one  is  forced  to 
admit  that  the  most  interesting  thing  about 
Woolner  is  his  diary  of  two  years  in  the  early 
Australian  diggings.  It  is  vividly  and  vigor- 
ously written  and,  unlike  most  stories  of  the 
sort,  it  does  not  conclude  its  depressing  record 
of  failure  with  the  discovery  of  a  nugget  as 
large  as  a  baby's  head.  Woolner  came  home 
richer  by  nothing  save  experience,  and  of  that, 
to  all  appearance,  he  made  little  use. 


SIR  CHARLES  DILKE 

IN  almost  every  chapter  of  Sir  Charles  Dilke's 
Life,  there  is  enough  material  for  a  Quarterly 
article.  His  experience  of,  and  judgments 
upon,  foreign  politics  would  in  themselves  make 
a  valuable  book.  He  was  in  politics  for  fifty 
years;  was  at  one  time  a  candidate  for  the 
Premiership;  he  knew  and  corresponded  with 
what  one  may  call  the  front  benches  of  five 
continents,  and  touched  every  sphere  of  social 
life.  His  versatility  was  amazing.  At  Cam- 
bridge he  was  top  of  the  Law  Tripos,  Presi- 
dent of  the  Union,  and,  but  for  his  doctor, 
would  have  rowed  twice  against  Oxford.  He 
read,  it  seems,  a  large  part  of  the  contents  of 
the  British  Museum;  he  was  asked  to  do  Keats 
for  the  "  English  Men  of  Letters  "  series ;  he 
travelled,  rowed,  fenced  and  dined  out  almost 
all  his  life;  and  he  found  time  to  acquire  on 
every  subject  of  current  politics  an  amount 
of  information  which  was  a  storehouse  for  every 
individual  and  organisation  that  ever  worked 
with  him.  But  if  it  is  quite  impossible  to 

[129] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

review  his  biography  because  there  is  too  much 
in  it,  from  another  point  of  view  it  is  difficult 
to  review  it  because  there  is  too  little.  It  is 
largely  composed  of  his  own  memoirs:  but  one 
learns  scarcely  anything  about  the  essential  man 
from  it. 

There  is  an  interesting  communication  here 
from  General  Seely,  who  says  that  for  a  long 
time  he  could  not  make  out  what  on  earth 
Dilke  was  up  to;  and  how  at  last  he  found  that 
his  only  motive  was  an  unselfish  desire  to  help 
his  more  unfortunate  fellow-men.  It  cannot 
but  have  been  that;  but  the  slowness  with 
which  General  Seely  appreciated  it  is  the  meas- 
ure of  Dilke's  extraordinary  reticence.  How 
far  his  intimates  got  past  this — how  far,  that 
is,  he  ever  had  an  intimate — one  cannot  tell; 
but,  dead  as  alive,  the  outside  observer  cannot 
really  feel  he  knows  him.  All  his  life  he  was 
to  some  extent  a  sphinx,  though  an  active  and 
loquacious  sphinx.  In  later  years  there  was  an 
added  mystery;  for  he  possessed,  in  the  public 
eye,  a  special  secret,  whether  it  was  the  secret 
of  his  guilt  or  the  secret  of  his  innocence.  But, 
apart  from  that,  he  did  not  disclose  himself; 
and  it  is  possible  that  he  did  not  even  know 
himself.  You  can  only  get  at  his  soul  by  in- 
ference. And  this  much  is  certain — and  the 


SIR  CHARLES  DILKE 

justice  or  injustice  of  his  condemnation  after 
the  scandal  is  not  relevant  here — that  no  man 
ever  put  up  a  finer  show  after  a  knock-down 
blow.  He  did  not  sulk,  or  take  to  drink,  or 
even,  as  he  might  pardonably  have  done,  retire 
to  the  country  and  read ;  he  faced  the  music  and 
began  a  second  political  career,  determining  by 
sheer  doggedness  to  induce  his  country  to  profit 
by  a  desire  and  ability  to  serve  her  which  have 
seldom  been  united,  in  such  a  degree,  in  a  single 
man.  He  succeeded  so  completely  that,  at  the 
end  of  his  life,  the  later  Dilke  had  completely 
obscured  the  earlier  Dilke  in  men's  minds.  That 
is  not  failure  in  the  private  man.  And  it  is 
arguable  that  Dilke  was  not  even  a  comparative 
failure  as  a  politician.  In  these  later  years — 
his  last  two  Parliaments  saw  him  sitting, 
straight-backed,  beautifully  dressed,  fortified 
with  many  blue-books,  with  the  new  Labour 
Party — he  was  directly  and  indirectly  respon- 
^ible  for  most  important  reforms,  notably  the 
Trade  Boards  Act.  His  advice  behind  the 
scenes  was  so  freely  sought  and  given  that  he 
may  properly  be  regarded  as  an  unofficial  leader 
of  the  Labour  movement.  He  did  far  more 
than  he  got  recognition  for;  but  he  had  lost  the 
desire  for  leadership;  and,  having  rehabilitated 
himself  in  the  eyes  of  his  countrymen,  he  was 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

not  anxious  for  recognition  of  any  other  kind. 
Influence — to  be  exercised  in  the  public  inter- 
est— was  what  he  wanted  and  got.  And  it  is 
at  least  arguable  that  he  would  have  done  little 
more  had  nothing  gone  wrong  than  he  did  as 
things  were.  For,  in  spite  of  his  intellectual 
attainments,  integrity  and  force  of  character,  he 
had  drawbacks  which  critics,  for  the  moment, 
seem  to  have  forgotten. 

It  seems,  in  short,  now  to  be  commonly  as- 
sumed that  had  it  not  been  for  the  Crawford 
catastrophe,  Dilke  would  have  become  leader 
of  his  party  and  Prime  Minister.  Gladstone 
expected  him  to  be,  and  Chamberlain  had 
agreed  that  he  should  be  so  on  account  of  his 
superior  authority  in  the  House.  Speculation 
on  the  point  is  of  the  "  If  Napoleon  had  won 
Waterloo  "  type :  you  may  advance  many  rea- 
sons for  whatever  view  you  hold,  but  you  cannot 
approach  proof.  But  personally,  not  only  do  I 
think  that  Chamberlain — leaving  other  candi- 
dates out  of  the  question — would  have  inevitably 
overtaken  Dilke  had  the  partnership  lasted  and 
prospered,  but  I  cannot  easily  persuade  myself 
that  anything  could  have  made  a  Prime  Min- 
ister out  of  Dilke.  He  was  a  statesman:  and 
he  was  exceedingly  skilful  as  a  mere  politician 
who  knew  the  best  way  in  which  to  get  things 


SIR  CHARLES  DILKE 

done.  His  knowledge  was  immense  of  many 
kinds.  He  was  fitted  for  any  ministerial  post, 
and  had  he  become,  in  later  years,  Foreign  Sec- 
retary, Colonial  Secretary,  Secretary  for  India, 
Home  Secretary,  President  of  the  L.G.B., 
President  of  the  Board  of  Education,  or  Presi- 
dent of  the  Board  of  Trade,  he  would  have 
known  more  about  any  of  these  jobs  than  any 
other  politician  of  his  time.  Everybody  who 
knew  him  respected  him:  most  people  who  met 
him  liked  him;  his  constituents,  both  in  Chelsea 
and  in  the  Forest  of  Dean,  were  exceedingly 
proud  of  him.  A  man  to  be  Prime  Minister 
may  have  far  less  knowledge,  sense  and  dis- 
interested patriotism  than  Dilke;  but  unless 
accident  has  given  him  the,  as  it  were,  auto- 
matic support  of  some  strong  "  interest,"  local, 
commercial,  social  or  religious,  he  must  have  the 
power  of  exciting  or  amusing,  at  any  rate  in- 
teresting, the  electorate.  Dilke's  personality 
was  not  of  the  sort  which  captivates  large 
masses  of  electors.  Writing  himself  of  a  speech 
he  made  in  his  twenties,  he  says: 

"  It  was  a  dreary  speech;  and,  given  the  fact 
that  my  speaking  was  always  monotonous,  and 
that  at  this  time  I  was  trying  specially  to  make 
speeches  which  no  one  could  call  empty  noise, 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

and  was  therefore  specially  and  peculiarly 
heavy,  there  was  something  amusing  to  lovers 
of  contrast  in  that  between  the  stormy  hearti- 
ness of  my  reception  at  most  of  these  meetings, 
and  the  ineffably  dry  orations  which  I  delivered 
to  them — between  cheers  of  joy  when  I  rose 
and  cheers  of  relief  when  I  sat  down." 

This  was  a  peculiar  occasion,  for  the  discussion 
over  the  Civil  List  had  given  Sir  Charles  a 
fleeting  reputation  as  a  Republican  fire-eater 
and  the  audiences  assembled  in  a  state  of  ex- 
citement. As  a  rule,  you  got  the  "  ineffably 
dry "  speech  without  the  cheers.  In  his  last 
ten  years  his  habits  of  discursiveness  and  dron- 
ing had  got  so  acute  that  he  was  impossible  to 
follow.  Whatever  the  subject — and  it  might 
be  anything  from  Army  organisation  to  the 
sweated  chainmakers  of  Cradley  Heath — he 
would  stand  up  and  pour  out  thousands  of  facts 
in  a  monotonous,  gruff  boom,  his  words  periodi- 
cally becoming  inaudible  as  he  buried  his  head 
in  his  notes  or  turned  round  to  pick  up  a 
profusely  annotated  blue-book  from  his  seat. 
The  Minister  concerned  would  stay;  a  few  ex- 
perts on  the  particular  subject  under  discussion 
would  compel  themselves  to  attend,  knowing 
that  his  matter  was  bound  to  be  valuable  if  they 

[134] 


SIR  CHARLES  DILKE 

could  onty  get  the  hang  of  it ;  the  rest  would  go. 
His  character  was  universally  respected;  he 
was  admired  as  a  repository  of  information  and 
wisdom,  and  a  young  member,  of  whatever 
party,  who  was  congratulated  by  him  upon  a 
speech  got  a  more  genuine  pleasure  out  of  his 
praises  than  from  any  perfunctory  compliments 
from  the  front  benches.  Nevertheless,  nothing 
could  stop  his  audiences  from  dwindling  away 
or  his  voice  from  lulling  the  survivors  to  sleep. 
He  knew  that  his  voice  was  monotonous:  that 
he  could  not  help.  But  he  had  also  an  intel- 
lectual disability  which  made  him  treat  every 
small  fact  as  if  it  were  of  equal  value  to  almost 
any  other  fact,  and  a  pronounced  tempera- 
mental disinclination  to  be  "  rhetorical."  He 
was  too  reticent  to  show  his  personality:  and 
he  would  not  manufacture  a  sham  personality 
for  public  exhibition.  He  hated  importing  feel- 
ing into  his  speeches,  however  strong  might  be 
the  passion  for  justice  or  mercy  behind  them: 
he  deliberately  refused  to  make  an  easy  appeal 
by  frequent  reference  to  "  first  principles  "  or 
cultivate  those  arts  of  expression  whereby  poli- 
tics may  be  made  enjoyable  to  bodies  of  men, 
or  even  those  arts  of  arrangement  whereby 
they  may  be  made  simple  and  comprehensible. 
He  felt  all  these  things  to  be  humbug,  and  hum- 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

bug  was  abhorrent  to  him:  failing  to  observe 
that,  since  under  our  system  speeches  are  an 
important  part  of  a  controversialist's  career  and 
of  a  minister's  administration,  it  is  the  business 
of  a  man  who  would  lead  his  countrymen  to 
pay  some  attention — unless  he  is  a  demagogue 
born — to  the  technique  of  "  rhetoric."  In  pri- 
vate conversation  Dilke  is  reported  to  have  been 
one  of  the  most  interesting  men  of  his  age.  But 
on  the  platform  and  in  the  House  of  Commons 
he  was  distinctly  and  undeniably  dull.  And  it 
is  possible  that  England  would  not  have  stood  a 
Radical  Prime  Minister  who  sent  her  to  sleep. 


THE  UTOPIAN  SATIRIST 

ME.  CHARLES  WHIBLEY  has  published, 
through  the  University  Press,  the  Leslie 
Stephen  Lecture  delivered  by  him  at  Cam- 
bridge. It  was  a  good  lecture,  if  rather  per- 
meated with  Mr.  Whibley's  political  cranks; 
and  its  chief  object  is  to  show  that  Macaulay 
and  other  critics  have  been  hopelessly  astray 
in  describing  Swift  as  a  low  and  beastly  ruffian 
who  hated  human  society  and  was  emphatically 
unfit  for  it. 

Mr.  Whibley  is,  of  course,  right.  Macaulay 
and  Thackeray  were  completely  wrong.  I  do 
not  think  it  is  quite  just  to  say  that  Macaulay 's 
opinion  was  founded  on  Whig  prejudices:  far 
more  probably  it  arose  from  sheer  disgust  at 
Swift's  frequent  filthiness,  and  from  misappre- 
hension of  his  custom  of  representing  men, 
when  he  was  attacking  them,  as  larded  with 
all  the  disagreeable  concomitants  of  the  sty. 
But  vilely  as  he  abused  mankind,  and  habitu- 
ated though  he  may  have  become  to  exagger- 
ated invective,  his  first  impulse  was  an  idealistic 

[137] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

one.  He  detested  men,  not  because  they  were 
men,  but  because  they  were  not  the  men  they 
might  be.  When  he  called  himself  a  misan- 
thrope, he  went  on  to  explain  that  he  intended 
to  prove  "  the  falsity  of  that  definition  animal 
rationale,  and  to  show  it  should  be  only  rationis 
capax."  He  uses  his  communities  in  Gulliver 
to  expose  in  the  most  savage  way  the  defects  of 
Western  civilisation:  but  can  those  who  call  this 
"cynical"  deny  that  the  defects  were  there? 
Mr.  Whibley  refers  very  properly  to  his  accept- 
ance of  the  "  generous  creed  "  of  the  King  of 
Brobdingnag,  "  that  whoever  could  make  two 
ears  of  corn,  or  two  blades  of  grass,  to  grow 
upon  a  spot  of  ground  where  only  one  grew 
before,  would  deserve  better  of  mankind,  and  do 
more  essential  service  to  his  country,  than  the 
whole  race  of  politicians  put  together."  Mr. 
Whibley  himself  has  so  marked  a  disbelief  in  all 
politicians  that  he  allows  this  "  simple  doc- 
trine "  to  stand  by  itself.  But  the  Utopia  in 
Swift's  heart  even  had  room  for  better  poli- 
ticians. Take  the  introduction  to  the  school  of 
political  projectors  in  Laputa: 

"  In  the  school  of  political  projectors  I  was  but 
ill  entertained,  the  professors  appearing  in  my 
judgment  wholly  out  of  their  senses,  which  is 

[138] 


THE  UTOPIAN  SATIRIST 

a  scene  that  never  fails  to  make  me  melancholy. 
These  unhappy  people  were  proposing  schemes 
for  persuading  monarchs  to  choose  favourites 
upon  the  score  of  their  wisdom,  capacity,  and 
virtue ;  of  teaching  ministers  to  consult  the  pub- 
lic good;  of  rewarding  merit,  great  abilities, 
eminent  services;  of  instructing  princes  to  know 
their  true  interest  by  placing  it  on  the  same 
foundation  with  that  of  their  people;  of  choos- 
ing for  employments  persons  qualified  to  exer- 
cise them;  with  many  other  wild  impossible 
chimaeras,  that  never  entered  before  into  the 
heart  of  man  to  conceive,  and  confirmed 
in  me  the  old  observation,  that  there  is 
nothing  so  extravagant  and  irrational  which 
some  philosophers  have  not  maintained  for 
truth." 

It  is  surely  obvious  that  these  are  not  the 
sentences  of  a  hater  of  mankind,  but  those  of 
one  who  was  continually  haunted  or  tormented 
by  the  undeveloped  possibilities  of  mankind. 
Man  is  "  capable  of  reason  " — and  will  not  use 
it.  Swift  himself  stated  that  he  would  "  forfeit 
his  life,  if  any  one  opinion  can  be  fairly  deduced 
from  that  book,  [The  Tale  of  a  Tub']  which  is 
contrary  to  Religion  or  Morality."  It  depends, 
of  course,  upon  what  you  mean  by  Religion; 

[139] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

and  a  clergyman  of  the  Established  Church  was, 
to  say  the  least,  unorthodox  when  he  informed 
the  Houyhnhms  that  "  difference  of  opinions 
hath  cost  many  millions  of  lives;  for  instance, 
whether  flesh  be  bread,  or  bread  be  flesh ;  whether 

i 

the  juice  of  a  certain  berry  be  blood  or  wine." 
But  generally  speaking,  his  claim  was  not  ab- 
surd. Even  his  obscenities  could  scarcely  give 
anyone  a  taste  for  the  obscene,  and,  compre- 
hensive though  his  irony  is,  he  seldom  if  ever 
jeers  at  genuine  virtue  or  makes  sport  of  suf- 
fering. As  Mr.  Whibley  suggests,  it  is  con- 
ceivable that  his  ironic  method  has  misled 
people;  though  how  anyone  in  his  senses  could 
have  supposed  that  he  meant  to  be  taken  liter- 
ally when  he  argued  that  the  superfluous  chil- 
dren of  the  poor  Irish  should  be  exported  for 
food,  it  is  difficult  to  conceive.  Some,  at  least, 
of  his  contemporaries  gave  him  credit  for  good 
intentions.  The  Irish,  at  one  period,  would 
have  risen  in  rebellion  had  the  Government 
attacked  him.  Pope,  Harley  and  Bolingbroke 
knew  the  warmth  of  his  affections.  And  an 
obscure  publisher,  who  printed  his  poems,  after 
remarking  on  the  savagery  with  which  he  had 
written  about  women  and  Whigs,  thought  fit  to 
add:  "We  have  been  assured  by  several  ju- 
dicious and  learned  gentlemen,  that  what  the 
[140] 


THE  UTOPIAN  SATIRIST 

author  hath  here  writ,  on  either  of  those  two 
Subjects,  hath  no  other  Aim  than  to  reform  the 
Errors  of  both  Sexes."  Surely  a  large  and 
lofty  aim! 

The  same  bookseller,  in  the  same  apology, 
made  another  true,  if  oddly  expressed,  observa- 
tion: "Whatever  he  writ,  whether  good,  bad 
or  indifferent,  is  an  Original  in  itself."  Swift 
was  one  of  the  most  natural  writers  we  have 
ever  had.  He  did  not  bother  at  all  about 
his  sentences:  he  had  a  quick,  vivid,  witty, 
logical  mind,  and  his  style  has  precisely  those 
qualities.  Mr.  Whibley  justly  compares  him  to 
Defoe,  both  for  his  easy  simplicity  and  for  his 
power  of  realistic  narrative.  To  make  one  be- 
lieve in  Gulliver's  Travels  was  an  even  greater 
feat  than  that  of  convincing  one  that  Robinson 
Crusoe  really  did  keep  his  hold  on  the  rock 
till  the  waves  abated,  land,  build  a  hut,  read 
the  Bible  to  his  parrot,  make  a  hat  out  of  goat- 
skins and  see  a  cannibal's  footprints  on  the 
sand.  But  Swift  does  it,  and  with  the  most 
wonderfully  cunning  touches  of  verisimilitude. 
How  pathetically  true  Gulliver's  longing,  when 
amongst  the  kindly  giants  of  Brobdingnag,  to 
be  "  among  people  with  whom  I  could  eon- 
verse  upon  even  terms,  and  walk  about  the 
streets  and  fields  without  fear  of  being  trod  to 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

death  like  a  frog  or  a  young  puppy  " ;  and  still 
more  that  other  flash: 

"  I  likewise  broke  my  right  shin  against  the 
shell  of  a  snail,  which  I  happened  to  stumble 
over,  as  I  was  walking  alone,  and  thinking  on 
poor  England." 

But  Defoe,  outside  straight  narration,  was 
clumsy.  His  satires  are  almost  unreadable. 
Swift  was  a  supreme  ironist:  he  was  as  great 
at  saying  something  by  saying  its  opposite  as 
he  was  at  direct  story-telling.  That  he  should 
have  chosen  irony  as  his  method  of  attacking 
abuses  was  natural. 

For  he  was,  at  bottom,  a  very  reticent  man. 
His  friends  had  often  to  deduce  his  good  heart 
from  his  good  deeds,  and  even  in  the  letters 
to  Stella  he  usually  keeps  to  the  superficies  of 
gossip  and  scandal.  His  anger  was  terrific 
when  it  broke  out.  The  most  amiable  of  men 
with  his  friends,  there  was  a  passion  in  him 
which  men  feared,  something  in  him,  it  may 
be,  he  even  feared  himself;  though  it  was  to 
that  he  owed  the  concentrate  force  of  expression 
which  must  have  been  his  chief  source  of  de- 
light. Vive  la  bagatelle  is  the  motto  (it  was 
his)  of  a  miserable  man.  Swift  was  a  miserable 
man;  but  the  causes  of  his  misery,  however 
[142] 


THE  UTOPIAN  SATIRIST 

obscure  they  may  be,  were  not  petty  ones. 
Men  are  seldom  great  through  being  unhappy; 
Swift  is  almost  unique  in  English  literature  in 
that  his  unhappiness  was  not  the  effect  but 
the  source  of  his  power.  The  "  fierce  indigna- 
tion "  that,  on  his  own  statement,  consumed 
him,  had  to  manifest  itself  in  grim  jokes  in- 
stead of  exalted  rhapsodies.  At  any  rate,  the 
ironical  method  became  second  nature  to  him. 
And  it  has  delightful  results  in  a  small  way  as 
well  as  magnificent  results  in  a  large  way.  He 
was  a  master  of  under-statement.  '  Yesterday 
I  saw  a  woman  flayed,  and  you  cannot  imagine 
how  it  altered  her  appearance  for  the  worse." 
The  little  incidental  jests  are  scattered  all 
over  his  minor  controversial  writings;  and  even 
in  the  most  necessary  preface  he  took  every 
opportunity  of  gravely  pulling  the  reader's,  or 
even  his  own  leg.  One  such  he  defended 
(speaking  as  one  of  "  The  Multitude  of  writers, 
whereof  the  whole  Multitude  of  Writers  most 
reasonably  complains  ")  on  the  ground  that: 

"  It  makes  a  considerable  Addition  to  the  Bulk 
of  the  Volume,  a  Circumstance  by  no  Means  to 
be  neglected  by  a  skilful  writer," 

which  is  an  extremely  modern  thought.  '  What- 
ever," he  added,  "  word  or  sentence  is  printed 

[143] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

in  a  different  character,  shall  be  judged  to  con- 
tain something  extraordinary  either  of  wit  or 
sublime."  He  was,  in  his  queer  way,  a  dreamer ; 
he  was  a  master  of  English;  a  great  realist; 
and  a  great  wit.  And  if  a  man  should  still 
think  he  went  too  far  in  his  exposure  of  the 
race  of  "  little  odious  vermin,"  to  which  he  be- 
longed, let  him  remember  two  things.  One  is 
that  Swift  projected  a  work  entitled  A  Modest 
Defence  of  the  Proceedings  of  the  Rabble  in 
All  Ages.  The  other  is  Swift's  own  despairing 
reflection,  that  "  there  is  not,  through  all  Na- 
ture, another  so  callous  and  insensible  a  Member 
as  the  World's  Posteriors,  whether  you  apply  to 
it  the  Toe  or  the  Birch." 


JANE  AUSTEN'S  CENTENARY 

JANE  AUSTEN  died  on  July  18,  1817,  at  the 
age  of  forty-one.  She  began  writing  early; 
Pride  and  Prejudice,  a  mature  work,  was  fin- 
ished when  she  was  twenty-one.  But  novel- 
writing  was,  to  her,  in  a  sense  a  recreation, 
like  another:  and  she  left  only  four  long  books, 
two  short  ones,  and  two  fragments.  These 
mean  so  much  to  her  admirers  that  one  of  them 
has  seriously  suggested  that  a  man's  worth  can 
be  estimated  once  and  for  all  by  his  ability 
to  appreciate  her.  She  had  a  most  "  unevent- 
ful "  life,  and  we  know  very  little  about  it.  Yet 
those  who  like  her  feel  that  they  know  her 
more  intimately  than  any  other  writer.  To  those 
who  have  not  read  her,  she  is  merely  a  woman 
with  a  name  like  a  governess,  who  lived  at  the 
same  period  as  Maria  Edgeworth  (another  of 
the  same  sort)  and  wrote  books  with  titles  such 
as  Emma  and  Sense  and  Sensibility,  which 
stamp  them  as  moral  treatises  of  the  worst  and 
most  edifying  kind.  But  to  those  who  know 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

her  she  is  unique,  a  delightful  secret,  a  secret 
shared  by  thousands  of  people. 

Miss  Austen  lived — as  an  author — in  greater 
seclusion  perhaps  than  any  other  English 
writer.  She  knew  no  celebrities  and  corre- 
sponded with  none:  her  name  did  not  appear 
on  her  title-pages;  and  her  fame  did  not  be- 
come considerable  until  after  her  death.  Dur- 
ing the  last  year  or  two  of  her  life  her  books 
sold  fairly  well,  and  she  received,  with  equa- 
nimity, two  tokens  of  appreciation.  The 
Quarterly  published  a  considerable  review  of 
her  work,  and  the  Prince  Regent's  Librarian, 
writing  on  behalf  of  his  illustrious  employer, 
asked  for  the  dedication  of  Emma.  Miss 
Austen  assented,  and  inscribed  the  book  to 
the  Regent:  upon  which  the  Librarian,  en- 
couraged, wrote  again,  suggesting  that  the 
author's  gifted  pen  might  properly  be  em- 
ployed upon  "  an  historical  romance  illustrative 
of  the  august  House  of  Coburg,"  which  was 
about  to  be  united,  by  a  holy  bond,  with  the 
Royal  House  of  England.  It  is  not  easy  to 
persuade  oneself  that  George  IV.  was  Jane 
Austen's  only  point  of  contact  with  the  great 
world:  it  is  absolutely  impossible  to  imagine 
what  a  German  historical  novel  by  her  would 
have  been  like.  She  could  not  imagine  it 


JANE  AUSTEN'S  CENTENARY 

either:  she  explained  to  the  Librarian  that  she 
could  not  undertake  any  story  in  which  it  would 
be  improper  to  laugh.  Treatises  with  a  serious 
subject  were  not  in  her  line.  "  I  think,"  she 
said,  "  I  may  boast  myself  to  be,  with  all  pos- 
sible vanity,  the  most  unlearned  and  uninformed 
female  who  ever  dared  to  be  an  authoress." 

This  is,  of  course,  an  exaggeration:  and  even 
had  it  been  literally  true  at  that  date,  she  would 
have  lost  her  proud  pre-eminence  ten  thousand 
times  over  by  now.  She  was  fairly  widely  read 
in  history  and  literature:  and  amongst  her 
other  accomplishments,  as  her  nephew  proudly 
relates,  were  embroidery  of  the  most  masterly 
kind,  spillikins,  and  cup-and-ball,  at  which  she 
once  caught  the  ball  a  hundred  times  running. 
One  would  expect  this:  she  was  a  human  being 
before  she  was  a  woman  of  intellect:  and  her 
propensity  for  entering  into  the  occupations 
and  amusements  of  her  circle  is  of  a  piece  with 
her  preference  to  write  about  the  world  she 
lived  in  rather  than  about  the  myriad  worlds 
she  did  not  live  in.  Her  brain  was  good  enough 
for  anything,  but  she  did  not  employ  it  in 
speculation  or  controversy  or  the  promiscuous 
acquisition  of  facts.  One  remembers  the  educa- 
tion of  the  two  Misses  Bertram,  who  thjught 
themselves  so  superior  to  Fanny  Price: 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

"  How  long  ago  it  is,  aunt,  since  we  used  to 
repeat  the  chronological  order  of  the  Kings  of 
England,  with  the  dates  of  their  accession,  and 
most  of  the  principal  events  of  their  reigns ! " 

"Yes,"  added  the  other;  "  and  of  the  Roman 
Emperors  as  low  as  Severus;  besides  a  great 
deal  of  the  human  mythology,  and  all  the 
metals,  semi-metals,  planets,  and  distinguished 
philosophers." 

There  has  been  no  critic  so  desperate  as  to 
suggest  that  she  was  the  product  of  the  French 
Revolution.  Her  complete  detachment  from 
the  Great  War,  which  raged  throughout  her 
writing  career,  has  often  been  mentioned.  She 
hoped  her  brothers  or  characters  in  the  Navy 
might  pick  up  a  little  prize-money:  and  there 
her  interest  ceased.  She  and  her  family  and 
her  neighbours  and  her  heroines  were  in  Chaw- 
ton  or  Meryton,  Bath  or  Lyme  Regis:  and 
those  arenas  were  quite  large  enough  for  the 
display  of  the  general  affections  and  particular 
idiosyncrasies  of  men  and  women.  She  limited 
her  art  still  further :  she  dealt  only  with  her  own 
social  class,  and  its  outskirts.  She  must  have 
known  farmers  and  cottagers  well  enough:  but 
they  never  appear  as  characters  in  her  books. 
It  is  evident,  therefore,  that  her  limitations  of 


JANE  AUSTEN'S  CENTENARY 

subject  were  as  much  a  matter  of  deliberate 
choice  as  of  opportunity.  The  genteel  families 
of  a  country  town,  the  officers  of  a  militia 
regiment,  the  local  clergy,  a  great  landlord  or 
two,  and  a  sprinkling  of  governesses  and  sailor 
sons  on  leave:  these  materials  she  found  quite 
sufficient  for  her  picture  of  life. 

England  has  had  few  such  finished  artists. 
There  is  only  one  conspicuous  weakness  in  her 
books.  It  is  not  true  that  she  could  draw 
women,  but  not  men:  her  subsidiary  men  are 
as  good  as  her  subsidiary  women.  But  her 
heroes  are  shadowy  and  unsatisfactory  com- 
pared with  her  heroines.  All  her  novels  were 
written  from  the  heroine's  standpoint.  In 
Pride  and  Prejudice  the  author  may  almost  be 
said  to  look  at  the  world  through  Elizabeth 
Bennet's  eyes:  in  all  the  other  books  she  is 
standing,  as  it  were,  at  the  side  of  her  heroines. 
She  knows  them  intimately:  she  never  troubles 
to  give  us  the  inner  history  of  the  young  men 
with  whom  they  are  in  love.  All  the  other  per- 
sons around  them  are  illuminated  and  made 
familiar  by  the  lamp  of  comedy  that  is  turned 
on  them.  This  operation  cannot  be  whole- 
heartedly performed  on  the  young  lovers; 
and  even  the  most  impressive  of  them,  Mr. 
Knightley,  and  the  nicest  of  them,  Commander 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Wentworth,  are  rather  vague  and  unexplored. 
We  can  deduce  the  rest  of  Mr.  Bennet  from 
what  Miss  Austen  shows  us:  Darcy's  per- 
sonality has  great  blanks  like  the  old  maps  of 
Africa.  We  have  to  assume  that  Darcy,  since 
Miss  Austen  thought  him  worthy  of  Elizabeth 
Bennet,  was  an  exceptionally  fine  man:  but 
we  know  very  little  about  him  except  that 
when  the  plot  necessitates  it  he  behaves  like  a 
pig,  and  when  the  plot  necessitates  it  he  behaves 
like  a  chivalrous  gentleman.  This  weakness, 
however,  is  remarkably  little  inconvenience  to 
the  reader.  We  are  prepared  to  take  these 
young  men  at  Miss  Austen's  valuation:  the 
hearts  of  the  women  are  quite  sufficiently  ex- 
posed to  make  the  love-stories  interesting;  and 
in  any  case  the  love-affairs  are  not  the  only 
props  of  the  books.  Their  first  interest  lies 
in  the  vision  they  give  us  of  the  everyday  life 
of  ordinary  families,  in  the  inexhaustible  in- 
terest drawn  from  the  apparently  humdrum  by 
a  woman  of  genius.  Her  people  are  the  people 
we  know.  The  Georgian  setting  of  harpsi- 
chords, muddy  roads,  Chippendale,  hahas  and 
Empire  dresses,  does  not  make  them  archaic: 
it  merely  makes  clearer  their  permanent  moder- 
nity, the  endurance  of  types  of  character,  of 
human  "  humours,"  impulses,  small  deceptions 


JANE  AUSTEN'S  CENTENARY 

and  generosities,  and  mannerisms  of  speech 
and  gesture.  There  must  have  been  Miss  El- 
tons,  Sir  Walter  Elliots  and  Miss  Bateses  in 
Athens:  they  must  exist  in  Samarkand:  and 
one  might  quite  conceivably  forget  whether  one 
had  read  about  Mary  Bennet  and  her  mother 
in  a  book  or  met  them  at  Cheltenham.  There 
they  all  are,  scores  of  them.  We  know  little 
directly  of  their  souls:  nor  do  we  of  most 
people  with  whom  we  dine  or  drink  tea.  But 
few  of  them — Collins  and  Lady  Catherine,  one 
admits,  are  Dickens  characters — are  less  real 
than  our  acquaintances.  And,  through  Miss 
Austen,  we  get  far  more  amusement  out  of 
them  than  we  do  out  of  our  acquaintances.  For 
Miss  Austen  had  sharper  eyes  than  we. 

Nobody  has  excelled  her  interiors,  or  in- 
vented such  exquisite  beginnings  and  endings. 
She  gets  one  intrigued  in  the  first  sentence,  yet 
without  the  least  effort.  And  no  great  writer 
of  English  has  kept  his  English  up  with  so  little 
apparent  effort.  The  quiet  tune  of  her  sen- 
tences is  never  broken,  yet  never  gets  dull.  She 
always  uses  the  right  word,  yet  never  with 
the  appearance  of  having  searched  for  it,  and 
the  felicities  of  her  humour  are  inexhaustible. 
"  Mr.  Knightley  seemed  to  be  trying  not  to 
smile;  and  succeeded,  without  difficulty,  upon 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Mrs.  Elton's  beginning  to  talk  to  him."  They 
are  usually  as  quiet  as  that:  they  produce  warm 
flickering  smiles  as  one  passes.  It  is  hopeless 
to  attempt  to  illustrate  them  here:  or  to  show 
how  discriminating  is  her  sarcasm  and  how 
sweet  and  sympathetic  is  the  spirit  underneath 
it.  She  was  in  the  line  of  Addison  and 
Goldsmith,  uniting  immense  sense  with  great 
sensibility.  Amid  the  tropical  forest  of  the 
Romantic  movement,  she  flourished,  the  most 
perfect  flower  of  the  eighteenth  century. 


MR.  CONRAD'S  MASTERPIECE 

MR.  JOSEPH  CONRAD  is  now  admitted  to  be 
one  of  the  greatest  living  writers  in  our  lan- 
guage. It  took  him  a  long  time  to  get  his  due 
from  any  but  a  small  public.  It  is  with  some- 
thing of  a  shock  that  one  reads  that  Lord  Jim, 
of  which  Messrs.  Dent  have  published  a  new 
six  shilling  edition,  was  written  over  twenty 
years  ago,  and  appeared  in  book  form  in  1901. 
What  were  the  masterpieces  which,  in  that  year, 
overshadowed  it?  Why  was  not  Mr.  Conrad  at 
that  stage  recognised  as  the  equal  of  Hardy 
and  Meredith,  whose  names,  bracketed  together, 
used  to  appear  in  the  reviews  ad  nauseam?  I 
speak  with  the  freedom  of  one  who  at  that 
period  was  not  a  professional  critic. 

Lord  Jim  is  the  story  of  a  man's  successful 
endeavour  to  rehabilitate  himself.  The  book 
opens  with  his  failure.  With  a  few  other  white 
men  he  is  taking  a  crowded  pilgrim  ship,  the 
Patna,  across  the  Indian  Ocean.  On  a  per- 
fectly still  moonlit  night  she  strikes  a  derelict 
and  her  forward  compartment,  screened  only 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

by  a  rusty  old  bulkhead,  is  flooded.  Only  the 
officers  know.  All  over  the  deck  the  half -naked 
pilgrims  sleep,  sighing  and  moaning  in  the  heat. 
The  German  captain  and  three  companions 
hurry  off  in  a  boat:  and  at  the  last  moment 
Jim,  undeliberately,  automatically,  jumps  in 
after  them.  The  ship,  as  it  happens,  does  not 
go  down;  there  is  an  enquiry,  and  the  deserters 
have  their  certificates  taken  away.  But  to  Jim 
the  important  thing  is  not  this;  it  is  the  knowl- 
edge that  he  has  failed  to  live  up  to  the  code; 
the  loss  of  honour  in  other  men's  eyes  and  still 
more  in  his  own;  his  unworthiness  of  his  native 
civilisation  and  of  the  service.  Wherever  he 
goes,  taking  odd  jobs  in  Asiatic  ports,  his  story 
follows  him;  and  once  it  has  turned  up,  even 
though  men  are  ready  enough  to  palliate  it,  he 
vanishes.  He  goes  always  eastward,  always 
hankering  for  a  chance  of  confirming  his  con- 
viction that  he  is  equal  to  the  greatest  calls 
that  can  be  made  upon  him.  And  in  the  end, 
among  savage  Malays  in  the  interior  of  an 
East  Indian  island,  he  gets  satisfaction.  He 
lives  to  know  what  it  is  to  be  absolutely  trusted 
by  men  and  dies  celebrating  a  "  pitiless  wed- 
ding with  a  shadowy  ideal  of  conduct." 

There  is  no  need  in  a  review  to  disclose  the 
details    of   this    story.      But   those   who    think 

[-54] 


MR.  CONRAD'S  MASTERPIECE 

Lord  Jim  Mr.  Conrad's  greatest  book  will  at 
least  meet  with  no  objection  from  the  author, 
and  Mr.  Conrad's  best  is  equal  to  the  best  of 
any  other  living  man.  As  an  achievement  in 
construction,  it  is  in  the  first  rank.  Mr.  Con- 
rad's method  is,  as  usual,  bizarre.  The  story 
is  begun  by  the  author;  then  taken  up  by  his 
favourite  narrator  Mario w,  who,  on  an  Eastern 
hotel  verandah,  tells  what  he  has  seen  of  Jim, 
and  what  he  has  picked  up  from  others,  to  a 
chance  group  of  men  lying  on  cane  chairs  in 
the  darkness,  smoking  and  drinking;  and  it 
ends  with  documents,  written  by  Mario  w  and 
Jim,  received  by  one  of  those  listening  men 
years  afterwards,  in  a  London  flat.  Each 
subsidiary  contributor  to  the  story  is  clearly 
described  in  his  special  digression,  and  there 
are  constant  side-stories.  Yet  the  impression 
with  which  one  finishes  is  one  of  unity,  har- 
mony, perfect  proportion.  There  are  one  or 
two  minor  flaws,  but  they  are  so  insignificant 
as  to  be  hardly  worth  mentioning.  The  digres- 
sions are  not  too  long;  the  pains  taken  with 
characters  only  slightly  connected  with  Jim  are 
not  wasted,  as  they  always  contribute  to  the 
picture  of  the  background  against  which  he 
lived  and  the  world  which  played  upon  his  feel- 
ings and  thoughts. 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

The  book  contains  a  large,  if  floating,  popu- 
lation of  portraits.  No  figure,  save  Jim's,  goes 
the  whole  way  through.  The  others  come  and 
go  under  the  rays  of  the  lamp  which  follows 
him  from  Aden  to  India,  from  Hongkong  to 
the  Moluccas;  smart  captains,  drunken  out- 
casts, ships'-chandlers,  merchants,  hotel-keepers; 
"Gentleman  Brown,"  the  pirate;  Egstrom  and 
Blake,  the  quarrelsome  partners;  Stein,  the  tall 
and  studious  old  German  trader,  with  his  quiet 
house,  his  great  tropical  garden  and  his  col- 
lection of  butterflies;  and  the  notabilities  of 
Patusan,  the  cringing  Rajah,  the  mean  half- 
breed  Cornelius,  massive  old  Doramin,  with  his 
ponderous  elbows  held  up  by  servants,  the  mys- 
terious and  pathetic  girl  whom  Jim  marries,  and 
Dain  Waris,  who  reminds  one  of  the  noble 
young  Malay  in  Almayer's  Folly.  Jim,  him- 
self, always  remains  a  little  vague.  Mr.  Con- 
rad's preoccupation  with  his  hero's  dominant 
idea,  as  deduced  from  his  actions  by  other 
people,  resulted  in  Jim  being  inadequately  dis- 
closed. But  the  more  rapid  portraits  are  all 
perfect.  And  in  no  book  of  Mr.  Conrad's 
is  a  greater  variety  of  scenes  so  surely  sketched. 
There  is  little  elaborate  set  description.  The 
account  of  the  pilgrim  ship's  voyage  under  the 
sun  and  moon  across  the  flat  ocean,  "  evenly 


MR.  CONRAD'S  MASTERPIECE 

ahead,  without  a  sway  of  her  bare  masts,  cleav- 
ing continuously  the  great  calm  of  the  waters 
under  the  inaccessible  serenity  of  the  sky,"  is 
magnificently,  almost  intolerably  vivid.  But 
when  the  narrative  comes  nominally  from  Mar- 
low,  the  descriptions  must  be  kept  within  bounds, 
lest  the  stretched  illusion  of  speech  should  snap. 
Even  so  on  almost  every  page  some  beautiful — 
and  usually  terribly  beautiful — scene  is  bitten 
into  one's  mind,  and  the  whole  region  of  Patu- 
san,  the  town  on  piles,  the  interminable  gloomy 
forest,  the  moon  rising  between  a  chasm  in  the 
hills,  the  muddy  waters,  the  marshes,  the  stag- 
nant air,  and  the  immense  blue  sea  round  the 
river's  last  bend,  is  pieced  gradually  together 
so  that  one  remembers  it  as  though  oneself  had 
been  there.  And  it  is  all  done  in  English  of 
a  grave  music  which,  from  one  to  whom  our 
language  is  not  native,  is  miraculous. 

I  think,  however,  that  the  book's  greatest 
quality  is  a  moral  one.  Like  the  late  Henry 
James,  Mr.  Conrad  scarcely  ever  preaches,  yet 
is  in  the  best  sense  a  didactic  writer.  He  is 
capable  of  speculation  about  conduct:  there  is 
an  immense  amount  of  it  behind  this  story. 
But  he  brings  something  else  than  curiosity  and 
agility  of  intellect  to  the  discussion.  "  Hang 
ideas!  "  exclaims  Marlow,  in  a  half -serious  aside. 

[157] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

"  They  are  tramps,  vagabonds  knocking  at  the 
back-door  of  your  mind,  each  taking  a  little 
of  your  substance,  each  carrying  away  some 
crumb  of  that  belief  in  a  few  simple  notions 
you  must  cling  to  if  you  want  to  die  decently 
and  would  like  to  live  easy."  It  is  rather  too 
stark  a  statement;  but  it  is  at  least  a  half- 
truth.  Take  Jim's  act  of  cowardice,  for  ex- 
ample. A  good  many  of  our  modern  moralists, 
with  their  mania  for  destroying  the  things  by 
which  men  have  lived  well  for  countless  genera- 
tions, would  probably  argue  that  he  did  right 
in  jumping  into  the  boat.  The  others  had 
gone;  the  ship,  as  far  as  he  knew,  would  in- 
fallibly sink;  there  was  no  earthly  chance  of  his 
saving  the  panic-stricken  passengers  if  he 
stayed;  and  in  any  case  a  man  is  not  respon- 
sible for  an  automatic  impulse.  Other  and 
darker  men  would  even  argue  that,  as  the  repre- 
sentative of  a  higher  civilisation,  a  strong  and 
enlightened  man,  Jim  was  even  doing  his  duty 
to  the  world  by  escaping  instead  of  sacrificing 
himself  for  the  sake  of  a  lot  of  besotted  and 
dirty  Moslems  on  their  way  to  Mecca.  Such 
arguments,  though  not  until  our  own  time  have 
philosophies  been  constructed  out  of  them,  are 
not  new.  They  are  familiar  to  every  man  in 
the  shape  of  inner  promptings.  We  have  all 


MR.  CONRAD'S  MASTERPIECE 

lapsed;  we  all  remember  things  we  are  ashamed 
of,  cowardices  which  we  cannot  forget;  and  we 
are  familiar  enough  with  the  voices  which  say, 
"What  does  it  matter?"  "To  yourself  you 
are  the  most  important  thing,"  "  Forget  it," 
'  Why  bother,  since  nobody  knows,"  and,  very 
subtly,  "  It  is  a  man's  first  duty  to  be  prudent." 
Circumstances  made  of  Lord  Jim,  especially  at 
the  end,  an  extreme  case.  But  all  the  same  he 
was  typical.  A  man's  self-respect  can  only  be 
restored  in  one  way:  by  doing  the  second  time 
what  he  has  failed  to  do  the  first.  A  civilisa- 
tion in  which  men  should  spend  their  time  pro- 
miscuously undermining  traditional  loves  and 
loyalties  by  imperfect  syllogisms  would  rot  to 
pieces.  If  you  believe  this,  even  at  the  risk  of 
encountering  the  last  and  supposedly  worst 
charge  of  being  a  sentimentalist,  you  take  the 
romantic  view  of  life:  and  you  will  have  Mr. 
Conrad  on  your  side.  His  books,  in  spite  of  all 
the  blood  and  thunder,  both  metaphorical  and 
literal,  that  there  is  in  them,  in  spite  of  the 
black  skies  behind  their  lightnings,  and  the 
brooding  sense  of  evil  that  pervades  his  medita- 
tions, are  an  incitement  to  decent  living.  I 
do  not  know  what  his  nominal  religion  is,  or  if 
he  professes  any;  he  is  obviously  perplexed  and 
oppressed  by  the  cruelty  and  pain  of  things. 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

But  if  he  sees  behind  the  world  a  pit  "  black  as 
the  night  from  pole  to  pole,"  he  finds  consola- 
tion not  in  the  insane  and  pathetic  assertion 
that  he  is  master  of  his  own  Fate,  but  "  in  a 
few  simple  notions  you  must  cling  to,"  which 
the  race,  after  some  thousands  of  years  of  ex- 
perience, has  discovered  to  be  more  effective. 


[160] 


FOUR  PAPERS  ON  SHAKESPEARE 

I:  Shakespeare's  Workmanship 

WHAT  a  pleasure  it  is  to  get  a  book  on 
Shakespeare  and  know  before  you  open  it  that 
it  will  be  fresh,  frank,  and  sensible,  free  at  once 
from  old  fustian  and  from  new  fantasies,  and 
certain  to  send  you  back  to  read  your  author 
with  increased  understanding  and  enjoyment! 
Sir  Arthur  Quiller-Couch's  Shakespeare's 
Workmanship  has  all  the  merits  of  his  previous 
works  and  the  additional  attraction  of  the  great- 
est subject  a  literary  critic  can  write  about. 

Sir  Arthur  treats  Shakespeare  as  a  human 
artist,  though  the  greatest:  a  man  capable  of 
indolence,  wilful  caprice,  and  occasional  inepti- 
tude: an  artist  working,  like  others,  under 
limitations,  unwilling  (as  great  artists  are)  to 
repeat  old  triumphs,  always  attacking  new  diffi- 
culties, and  sometimes  (as  in  that  last  group 
of  plays  which  cover  long  periods  of  time  and 
deal  with  slow  spiritual  processes)  failing  to 
surmount  them.  With  so  full  a  book  before 

[rti] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

him  the  reviewer  can  do  no  more  than  quote 
and  criticise  a  few  things  at  random.  Sir 
Arthur  throws  light  on  every  play  and  on  the 
principles  of  art  in  general;  the  study  of 
"  workmanship  "  gives  him  a  very  wide  refer- 
ence with  limits  difficult  to  determine.  He  is 
extraordinarily  good  on  Hamlet,  in  which  he 
says,  after  all  the  wiseacres  have  dowered 
Shakespeare  with  all  their  philosophies  and 
pathologies,  there  is  no  "  mystery  "  whatever—- 
except the  slight  unsolved  and  usually  un- 
noticed mystery  as  to  why  the  murdered  king 
was  succeeded  by  his  brother,  and  not  by  his 
son.  He  notes  in  the  Merchant  of  Venice  how 
Shakespeare  was  handicapped  by  his  ready- 
made  and  preposterous  plots  about  the  pound 
of  flesh  and  the  casket.  They  gave  him  little 
room  for  the  natural  development  of  character, 
he  had  to  concentrate  on  Shylock  or  Portia. 
There  ought,  says  Sir  Arthur,  "to  be  a  close 
time  "  for  the  discussion  of  the  Trial  Scene. 

Discussing  criticisms  made  against  the  weak- 
nesses and  complexities  of  Cymbeline,  he  says, 
justly,  that  what  Shakespeare  did  in  that  play 
was  to  create  Imogen,  the  loveliest  and  noblest 
heroine  in  all  literature;  and  that  since  he  did 
so  rare  a  thing  we  may  assume  that  that  is 
what  he  was  chiefly  trying  to  do.  As  You 
[162] 


SHAKESPEARE'S  WORKMANSHIP 

Like  It  elicits  the  remark  that  it  is  "  arguable 
of  the  greatest  creative  artists  that,  however 
they  learn  and  improve,  they  are  always  trading 
on  the  stored  memories  of  childhood." 

There  is  one  play  about  which,  exercising  a 
reader's  right  with  the  utmost  deference  and 
diffidence,  I  dare  to  differ  from  Sir  Arthur 
and  from  the  majority  of  critics.  I  do  not 
think  Macbeth  entirely  comes  off.  Sir  Arthur 
remarks,  and  this  indisputable  truth  has  been 
disastrously  forgotten  by  many  modern  play- 
wrights, that  whatever  a  "  hero  "  is,  does,  or 
suffers,  it  is  essential  that  he  should  command 
the  sympathies  of  the  audience.  He  sets  forth 
all  the  case  against  Macbeth,  and  adds  that 
the  great  poetry  which  is  put  into  his  mouth 
"  drapes  him  with  the  illusion  of  greatness," 
but  that  this  is  not  enough,  and  that  he  is  only 
saved  by  being  represented  as  a  victim  of  some 
fatal  hallucination  of  undefined  strength  im- 
posed on  him  by  evil  supernatural  powers.  I 
thoroughly  agree  with  Sir  Arthur's  attack  on 
those  who  under-estimate  the  importance  of  the 
supernatural  element  in  the  play,  and  who  fail 
to  understand  the  spell  that  a  story  like  that  of 
the  witches  on  the  blasted  heath  must  exercise 
on  all  imaginative  minds.  I  agree  with  his 
diagnosis  of  Shakespeare's  problem  here  and 

[163] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

of  the  means  he  adopted  to  solve  it.  Where  I 
differ  from  him  is  in  holding,  unlike  him,  that 
Shakespeare  failed.  There  was,  I  think,  a 
double  failure.  Easy  though  Shakespeare  found 
it  to  write  great  speeches  and  impute  them  to 
any  character,  it  was  not  so  easy  to  convince  us 
that  that  character  really  spoke  them.  The 
great  imaginative  passages  spoken  by  Hamlet, 
by  Prospero,  and  by  the  raving  Lear,  we  can 
accept  not  as  Shakespeare's,  but  as  theirs:  they 
spring  directly  from  their  intellects  and  emo- 
tions as  we  know  them;  they  are  more  intense 
than  their  contexts,  but  all  of  a  piece  with 
them.  These  men  have  no  need  to  be 
"  draped "  with  the  illusion  of  greatness,  for 
they  are  great.  With  Macbeth  it  is  different. 
When  he  says  things  like 

And  all  our  yesterdays  have  lighted  fools 
The  way  to  dusty  death 

the  great  language  is  a  "  drapery."  It  hangs 
loosely  and  awkwardly  upon  him;  it  does  not 
belong  to  him;  the  greatness  is  Shakespeare's, 
and  not  his;  the  illusion  is  not  produced.  Mac- 
beth is  not  made  great  by  the  mere  loan  of 
a  poet's  imagery,  and  he  is  not  made  sympa- 
thetic, however  adequately  his  crime  may  be 
explained  and  palliated,  by  being  the  victim  of 
a  hallucination.  We  might  feel  very  deeply 


SHAKESPEARE'S  WORKMANSHIP 

with  such  a  victim  had  he  won  our  affection 
or  admiration  previous  to  his  hallucination  or 
were  he,  outside  that,  a  fine  fellow;  but  this 
man  has  never  attracted  us  at  all;  and  though 
any  weak  doomed  man  must  arouse  some 
measure  of  pity,  our  interest  in  Macbeth  is 
nothing  compared  with  that  which  we  feel  in 
Hamlet  and  Othello  and  Lear,  and  even  less 
than  that  which  is  stirred  by  his  inexcusable 
and  unhallucinated,  but  tigerishly  resolute,  lady. 
The  principal  character  in  Macbeth,  in  fact, 
is  dull;  he  makes  no  appeal;  we  do  not  greatly 
mind  wrhat  happens  to  him;  and  the  play,  in 
spite  of  sublime  scenes  and  poetry,  is  an  illus- 
tration and  a  warning  to  artists  who  deny,  or 
forget,  that  no  powers  of  execution  and  no 
subordinate  achievement  can  compensate  for  a 
central  figure  who  is  "  unsympathetic,"  and 
that  it  is  better  for  a  "  hero  "  to  provoke  active 
fear  or  hate  than  indifference  or  half-con- 
temptuous pity.  It  is  no  use  having  a  hero 
who  makes  people  feel,  from  first  to  last,  that 
he  wants  a  good  shaking.  The  mistake  was  not 
one  that  Shakespeare  usually  made ;  but  his  plot 
beat  him.  The  emotional  hold  of  the  play 
would  have  been  immeasurably  greater  had  he 
set  Macbeth  against  an  equally  prominent  but 
lovable  character:  given  him,  say,  an  innocent, 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

horror-stricken  wife  instead  of  a  fellow-mur- 
derer who  is  not  only  as  incapable  as  he  of 
drawing  our  affection,  but  who  incidentally 
throws  him  into  the  shade  as  a  criminal. 

The  end  of  Othello — on  which  Sir  Arthur 
barely  touches — is  a  subtler  matter;  whether 
one  thinks  the  workmanship  fails  depends  upon 
whether  one  believes  that  the  most  noble  and 
generous  Othello,  even  though  a  Moor,  and  de- 
ceived, and  mad  with  jealousy,  really  could 
have — did,  in  fact — kill  his  wife.  Men  in  such 
situations,  no  doubt,  have  killed  guiltless  wives, 
and  some  of  these  men  have  possibly  been 
strong  and  lovable  people.  But  I,  at  least, 
experience  when  I  come  to  that  death,  not 
those  feelings  which  one  has  when  a  tragedy 
works  to  its  inevitable  and  natural  climax,  but, 
mingled  with  sickening  horror  for  poor  little 
Desdemona,  anger  and  irritation  not  against 
Othello,  but  against  Shakespeare,  who  is  direct- 
ing him.  Sir  Arthur,  in  his  brief  parenthesis 
on  the  play,  quotes  a  lady  as  having  shouted  to 
Othello  from  the  auditorium:  "  You  great  black 
fool;  can't  you  see?"  What  I  feel  like  saying, 
and  I  can't  think  my  impressions  are  unique,  is 
not  that,  but :  "  Look  here,  Shakespeare,  you'd 
no  right  to  do  this  merely  because,  before  you 
started,  you  decided  that  this  was  the  way  the 
[166] 


SHAKESPEARE'S  WORKMANSHIP 

story  should  go.  You  know  better.  You're 
monkeying  with  human  nature,  and  you've  no 
excuse." 

Sir  Arthur's  readers  must  hope  that  he  will 
supplement  this  volume  with  another  covering — 
with  whatever  central  theme — those  plays  which 
are  not  studied  in  this  volume.  There  is  one, 
I  think,  which  really  should  have  been  here,  the 
main  characteristics  of  Shakespeare's  technical 
aims  and  achievements  being  the  subject.  That 
play  is  Troilus  and  Cressida.  Too  little  atten- 
tion has  always  been  given  to  it;  and  those 
critics  who  have,  at  length,  written  about  it  have 
concentrated  too  much  upon  the  love-story — 
drawing,  incidentally,  from  this  quite  convinc- 
ing picture  of  a  fickle  girl  and  an  embittered 
lover  unjustifiable  deductions  about  Shake- 
peare's  frame  of  mind  when  he  wrote  it. 

The  chief  interest  of  the  play,  and  certainly 
its  chief  interest  as  a  piece  of  "  workmanship," 
seems  to  me  to  lie  in  its  vividness  as  a  pano- 
rama, as  a  series  of  suddenly  illuminated  scenes 
in  which  many  characters,  Greek  and  Trojan, 
live  and  move,  each  with  his  distinct  face  and 
opinions  and  temper.  It  resembles  one  of  those 
bright  and  crowded  "  compartment "  pictures 
that  the  early  Flemings  painted.  If  both 
Troilus  and  Cressida  were  left  out,  the  siege  of 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Troy,  in  sections,  would  remain;  and  I  cannot 
think  (and  I  am  sure  Sir  Arthur  would  not 
think)  that  in  making  that  great  tapestry 
Shakespeare  did  not  know  what  he  was  doing, 
and  know  that,  in  drama,  it  was  a  novel  and 
difficult  thing. 

II:   The    Blackamoor 

IN  the  last  paper  I  made  some  remarks  about 
Othello.  I  will  not  inflict  a  literal  repetition 
of  these  upon  my  readers  (if,  as  the  modest 
editor  said,  any  such  there  be),  but  the  gist 
of  them  was  that  the  end  of  the  play  was  not 
convincing.  I  argued  that,  although  some  men 
might  kill  their  wives  out  of  jealousy,  the 
Othello  whom  we  have  got  to  know  in  the  play, 
passionate  though  he  is,  would  not  have  done 
it.  All  round,  it  is  not  an  inevitable,  but  a 
forced — even  a  faked — ending,  however  this 
may  be  disguised  by  the  verisimilitude  of  Shake- 
speare's detail  and  the  natural  splendours  of  his 
language.  I  had  never  examined  the  sources  of 
the  play,  but  I  thought  that  probably  the  plot 
as  Shakespeare  found  it  hampered  him:  that 
Othello  murdered  his  wife  "  in  the  original," 
and  that  the  dramatist  made  him  do  it  in  his 
play  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  as  the  play  de- 
veloped Othello's  character  grew  into  something 
[168] 


THE  BLACKAMOOR 

quite  unlike  that  of  the  murderer.  I  have  now 
looked  up  the  original,  and  find  confirmation 
of  the  theory. 

The  story  is  taken  from  a  collection  of  fables 
(Hecatommitki)  by  Giovanbattista  Giraldi, 
called  Cinthio,  who  was  a  University  professor 
at  Ferrara,  and  published  his  book  in  1565. 
Each  tale  was  supposed  to  illustrate  a  moral 
virtue,  but  which  virtue  was  illustrated  by 
the  story  of  Othello  my  informant  (the  Yale 
Shakespeare)  sayeth  not.  The  book  was  not 
translated  into  English,  so  far  as  we  know; 
the  conclusion  being  (we  are  used  to  these 
puzzling  deductions  about  Shakespeare)  that 
either  Shakespeare  knew  Italian,  French,  or 
Spanish,  or  else  he  heard  the  story  at  second 
hand.  In  Cinthio's  tale,  "  Disdemona  "  is  the 
only  person  with  a  name.  Othello  is  "  the 
Moor";  lago  is  "the  Ensign";  Cassio,  "the 
Captain";  Emilia,  "the  Ensign's  wife";  and 
Bianca,  "  a  courtesan."  Disdemona,  against  her 
parents'  wishes,  marries  the  valiant  Moorish 
general,  and  insists  on  going  with  him  to 
Cyprus.  Mark  what  follows.  lago  falls  in 
love  with  Disdemona,  who  is  attached  to  lago's 
wife.  Failing  to  seduce  her,  lago  ascribes  his 
failure  to  Cassio.  Cassio  gets  into  disgrace 
for  striking  a  soldier;  Disdemona  intercedes 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

for  him,  and  this  gives  lago  his  cue.  He  tells 
Othello  that  Disdemona  is  in  love  with  Cassio 
and  "  has  taken  an  aversion  to  your  blackness." 
The  handkerchief  plot  is  developed,  and  the 
Moor,  convinced,  "  fell  to  meditating  how  he 
should  put  his  wife  to  death,  and  likewise  the 
Captain,  so  that  their  death  should  not  be  laid 
to  his  charge/3 

Then,  lago  and  Othello  together  "  consulted 
of  one  means  and  another  " — poison  and  dag- 
gers— to  kill  Disdemona,  but  could  come 
to  no  conclusion.  At  last  the  ingenious  Ensign 
said :  "  A  plan  comes  to  my  mind,  which  will 
give  you  satisfaction  and  raise  cause  for  no 
suspicion.  It  is  this:  the  house  in  which  you 
live  is  very  old,  and  the  ceiling  of  your  chamber 
has  many  cracks;  I  propose  we  take  a  stocking 
filled  with  sand,  and  beat  Disdemona  with  it  till 
she  dies;  thus  will  her  body  bear  no  signs  of 
violence.  When  she  is  dead  we  can  pull  down  a 
portion  of  the  ceiling,  and  thus  make  it  seem  as 
if  a  rafter  falling  on  her  head  had  killed  the 
lady.  Suspicion  cannot  rest  on  you,  since  all 
men  will  impute  her  death  to  accident."  The 
Moor  was  pleased  with  this  advice,  and  accepted 
it.  One  night,  when  he  and  Disdemona  were 
in  bed,  the  Ensign,  who  had  been  concealed  in 
a  closet  opening  into  the  chamber,  made  a  noise, 
[170] 


THE  BLACKAMOOR 

according  to  plan.  The  Moor  said  to  his  wife: 
"Did  you  not  hear  that  noise?" 

"  Indeed,  I  heard  it,"  she  replied. 

"  Rise/'  said  the  Moor,  "  and  see  what  'tis." 

Disdemona  got  out  of  bed,  and  as  she  ap- 
proached the  closet  the  other  villain  rushed  out 
"  and  beat  her  cruelly  with  the  bag  of  sand 
across  her  back,  upon  which  Disdemona  fell  to 
the  ground,  scarcely  able  to  draw  her  breath  " ; 
but  with  the  little  voice  she  had  left,  she  called 
upon  the  Moor  for  aid.  But  the  Moor,  leaping 
from  the  bed,  exclaimed:  "Thou  wickedest  of 
women,  thus  has  thy  falseness  found  its  just  re- 
ward." The  poor  lady  protests  her  innocence, 
but  lago  keeps  pounding  her  until  she  is  sense- 
less. The  two  men  then  lay  her  on  the  bed, 
wound  her  on  the  head,  and  pull  down  the  ceiling 
of  the  room.  Then  the  Moor  shouts  that  the 
house  is  falling  down,  and  the  neighbours  come 
running  in  to  find  Disdemona  dead  under  a 
rafter.  The  two  murderers  escape  suspicion  at 
the  time.  Othello  gets  to  hate  lago,  fears  to 
kill  him,  but  disgraces  him.  lago  then  tells 
Cassio  about  the  crime,  and  both  murderers  come 
ultimately  to  bad  ends.  "  Thus  did  Heaven 
avenge  the  innocence  of  Disdemona " — and 
demonstrate,  as  I  suppose  the  Italian  moralist 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

contends,  that  it  is  unwise  and  unsafe  to  mur- 
der one's  wife. 

This  plot,  accepted  as  Shakespeare's  chief 
source,  illuminates  three  remarkable  things. 
The  first  is  Shakespeare's  genius  for  clothing 
bare  bones;  the  second  is  his  wonderful  sense 
for  noticing  weaknesses  in  his  originals,  and 
remedying  them;  and  the  third  is  his  occasional 
failure  (as  I  choose  to  think  it)  to  let  that 
sense  guide  him  all  the  way.  He  saw  that 
Cinthio's  Othello  was  quite  impossible  as  a  hero. 
He  could  not  be  kept  on  that  footing  with 
lago;  the  disgustingly  calculated  confederate 
murder  was  impossible;  Othello  could  not,  if 
he  was  to  obtain  any  sympathy,  be  the  sort  of 
man  who  would  survive  and  indulge  in  recrimi- 
nations with  a  blackmailing  accomplice.  Turn 
to  the  death-scene  in  the  play : 

It  is  the  cause,  it  is  the  cause,  my  soul; 
Let  me  not  name  it  to  you,  you  chaste  stars ! 
It  is  the  cause.     Yet  I'll  not  shed  her  blood 
Nor  scar  that  whiter  skin  of  hers  than  snow, 
And  smooth  as  monumental  alabaster. 
Yet  she  must  die,  else  she'll  betray  more  men. 
Put  out  the  light,  and  then  put  out  the  light: 
If  I  quench  thee,  thou  flaming  minister, 
I  can  again  thy  former  light  restore, 
Should  I  repent  me;  but  once  put  out  thy  light, 
Thou  cunning'st  pattern  of  excelling  nature, 

[172] 


THE  BLACKAMOOR 

I  know  not  where  is  that  Promethean  heat 
That  can  thy  light  relume. 

So  to  the  most  beautiful  and  awful  dialogue, 
the  greatest  dialogue  in  Shakespeare,  and  its 
close  "  But  while  I  say  one  prayer! "  "  It  is 
too  late."  That  is  what  takes  the  place  of 
Cinthio's  abomination.  Cinthio  was  scrapped. 
Othello's  character  was  remade.  He  grew, 
under  Shakespeare's  hands,  one  of  the  noblest 
and  most  generous  of  men,  a  husband  worthy 
of  his  wife.  But  he  grew  too  noble  and  gen- 
erous, and  though  Shakespeare  used  all  the 
resources  of  his  incomparable  art  to  palliate 
and  explain  the  crime,  though  the  murder  in 
the  play  is  committed  by  a  demented  man  whose 
reason  has  temporarily  been  destroyed  by  the 
breaking  of  his  ideal,  and  who  immediately 
afterwards  kills  himself  in  remorse: 

I  kiss'd  thee  ere  I  kill'd  thee ;  no  way  but  this, 
Killing  myself  to  die  upon  a  kiss, 

he  did  not  succeed  in  making  us  feel  that  the 
thing,  granted  the  characters,  had  to  happen. 
Othello,  I  am  heretic  enough  to  think,  should 
have  ended  happily,  and  been  grouped  with 
the  "  Comedies."  But  though  Shakespeare  took 
every  sort  of  liberty  with  what,  when  he  found 
it,  was  little  more  than  a  crude  anecdote,  it 

[173] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

did  not  occur  to  him,  or  he  did  not  choose,  to 
alter  the  end,  which — when  he  first  began  the 
play — was  no  doubt  the  thing  which,  by  its 
dramatic  possibilities,  attracted  him  and  towards 
which  he  was  all  the  time  working  up. 

It  is  one  more  illustration  of  Sir  Arthur 
Quiller-Couch's  theory  that  Shakespeare  was 
occasionally  hampered  by  his  plots.  Sir  Ar- 
thur's own  chief  illustration  is  drawn  from  the 
"Merchant  of  Venice,  where  the  silly  arrange- 
ments about  the  caskets  and  the  pound  of 
flesh — which  would  never  have  sprung  from  the 
imagination  of  a  Shakespeare,  but  were  indo- 
lently retained  since  they  were  found  in  his 
original — hampered  him  badly,  crippled  his 
characterisation,  and  compelled  him  to  con- 
centrate upon  a  few  persons  and  a  few  scenes 
for  his  really  great  effects.  The  conclusion  is 
that,  like  Homer,  Shakespeare  sometimes  nods: 
an  admission  that  need  not  be  left  to  those 
iconoclasts  who,  not  knowing  the  greatest  plays 
and  the  greatest  poetry  in  the  world  when  they 
see  them,  spend  their  time  attempting  to  con- 
vince people  that  the  general  reverence  for 
Shakespeare  is  absurd  and  that  his  plays  are 
no  better  than  anyone  else's.  The  late  Tolstoy 
was  one  of  these. 

[174] 


HAMLET 

III:  Hamlet 

MR.  J.  M.  ROBERTSON  will  not,  I  hope,  be 
again  returned  to  Parliament,  if  election  would 
mean  the  interruption  of  the  work  he  is  doing 
upon  Shakespeare.  He  proposes  a  general  sur- 
vey of  "  The  Canon  of  Shakespeare  ";  his  books 
on  Titus  Andronicus  and  Shakespeare  and 
Chapman  were  instalments  of  it;  and  a  third 
fragment  is  his  book  The  Problem  of  Hamlet, 
published  by  Allen  and  Unwin. 

He  begins  with  a  summary  of  the  views 
expressed  by  previous  scholars.  The  aesthetic 
problem  has  been  discussed  for  two  centuries, 
in  England  and  Germany  especially,  "  latterly 
with  the  constant  preoccupation  of  finding  a 
formula  which  shall  reduce  the  play  to  aesthetic 
consistency."  Inconsistencies  have  been  found 
in  Hamlet's  character  and  actions;  weaknesses 
in  some  passages  which  in  other  passages  do 
not  appear.  But  "  every  solution  in  turn  does 
but  ignore  some  of  the  data  which  motived 
the  other."  One  "  subjective  school  "  concen- 
trating on  Hamlet's  character  as  though  he 
were  a  real  person  all  of  whose  words  were 
actually  spoken,  call  him  mad,  or  vacillating, 
or  the  slave  of  sensibility,  or  "  the  victim  of  an 
excess  of  the  reflective  faculty  which  unfits 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

him  for  action."  The  obvious  retort  is  that  he 
is  reckless  of  his  life  and  frequently  prompt 
in  action.  Why,  then,  it  is  answered,  does  he 
delay  his  mission?  He  does  not,  is  the  reply; 
but  the  counter-reply  is  that  he  is  certainly  felt 
to  do  so  and  that  on  the  stage  far  too  long 
a  period  seems  to  elapse.  Another  school  here 
interposes.  There  was  no  weakness  in  Hamlet, 
but  there  were  material  difficulties  in  his  way: 
the  King  was  always  surrounded  by  his  guards 
and  could  not  be  got  at.  Of  this,  however, 
there  is  no  evidence,  and  many  bewildered 
persons  have  finally  fallen  on  the  comfortable 
bosom  of  the  theory  that  Hamlet  was  mad  and 
that  therefore  nothing  he  did  or  said  is  neces- 
sarily explicable  or  (on  that  assumption)  in 
the  least  inexplicable.  The  reply  to  this  is  that 
Hamlet  was  obviously  not  mad,  that  we  take 
a  painful  interest  in  all  he  thinks;  and  that 
Shakespeare  was  not  so  mad  as  to  write  a  play 
the  central  figure  of  which  was  throughout  all 
the  acts  puzzling  an  audience  by  speeches  and 
deeds  which  had  no  cohesion  and  leading  them 
to  take  seriously  ruminations  which  were  merely 
ravings.  At  all  events,  save  amongst  those  who 
pity  him  as  a  maniac,  Hamlet  has  few  friends. 
They  rebuke  his  weakness,  and  "  for  not  kill- 
ing Claudius  either  at  the  start  or  in  the 


HAMLET 

praying-scene,  Hamlet  has  been  the  theme  of  a 
hundred  denunciations  by  zealous  moralists.'* 

Of  recent  years  there  has  been  a  general 
tendency  to  examine  the  texts  historically;  we 
have  grown  conscious  of  faults  in  the  dramatist 
as  dramatist;  faults  of  idleness  (if  the  word 
can  be  used  of  one  so  productive) ;  faults  aris- 
ing from  lack  of  knowledge  and  time,  from 
fatigue,  from  consideration  of  his  audience,  and 
above  all — though  this  overlaps  with  the  first — 
faults  arising  from  the  material  he  was  using. 
He  took  his  plots  secondhand;  the  crude  action 
and  characterisation  of  the  moulds  frequently 
failed  to  suit  what  he  poured  into  them.  Othello 
is  one  instance;  the  Merchant  of  Venice  is  an- 
other ;  Hamlet  is  a  third.  There  was  an  original 
barbaric  story;  there  was  a  play  (probably  by 
Kyd)  of  which  Mr.  Robertson  believes  the  Ger- 
man Brudermord  to  have  been  an  adaptation. 
Shakespeare's  Hamlet  was  based  on  Kyd's; 
incidents  which  are  excrescences  on  it  (this  is 
the  theme  Mr.  Robertson  develops  with  great 
acumen,  though  he  sometimes  forces  the  pace) 
derive  from  Kyd's  play;  and  the  contradictions 
are  due  to  Shakespeare's  having  failed  to  elimi- 
nate stock  elements  in  the  story  which  he  had 
inherited.  I  think  Mr.  Robertson  sometimes 
goes  too  far;  Shakespeare  may  have  "taken 

[177] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

on  "  the  feigned  madness,  but  I  don't  think  he 
failed  to  make  it  consistent  with  our  Hamlet. 
In  fact,  though  much  that  Mr.  Robertson  says 
is  convincing,  and  Shakespeare  did  undoubtedly 
fail  to  produce  a  thoroughly  coherent  work  of 
art,  I  don't  find  that  there  is  really  much  that 
clashes  with  his  hero  and  his  "  pessimism  "  and 
introspection. 

Even  as  the  play  stands,  and  granted  that 
Shakespeare  was  to  some  extent  impeded  by 
an  inherited  plot  and  the  crude  characterisa- 
tion of  Kyd  or  another,  are  its  inconsistencies 
so  very  hard  to  swallow?  Read  the  play  as 
Shakespeare  finally  left  it,  see  it  acted  uncut; 
and,  whatever  minor  stumbling-blocks  there 
may  be  in  the  text,  whatever  outcrops  of  a  lower 
deposit  that  Shakespeare  had  not  bothered  to 
remove,  does  there  not  remain  dominant  a  con- 
vincing character,  a  person  Hamlet?  Is  he  not 
as  nearly  complete,  as  positive  and  as  nearly 
like  a  living  being  as  any  character  in  a  fic- 
tion can  be?  Should  we  not  know  him  if  we 
met  him,  "  larger  than  human  "  though  he  is? 
Do  we  find  it  so  easy  to  define  in  a  phrase  the 
characters  of  our  own  friends  that  we  should 
expect  to  "  reduce  him "  (as  the  phrase  has 
gone)  to  a  "fixed  and  settled  principle"?  His 
action  may  seem  inconsequent  and  his  words 


HAMLET 

wild,  but  is  there  really  any  difficulty  about 
what  have  commonly  been  supposed  to  be  the 
larger  stumbling  blocks?  To  me  the  brooding 
Hamlet  of  the  soliloquies  is  not  intrinsically 
incompatible  with  the  Hamlet  who  is  a  good 
soldier,  and  a  master  of  fence,  who  lunges  at 
Polonius  through  the  arras,  leaps  recklessly  into 
Ophelia's  grave,  sends  his  warders  to  their  death, 
and  boards  the  pirate  ship  single-handed.  It  is 
one  thing  to  attack  a  pirate  when  you  see  one 
or  to  pink  an  eavesdropper;  but  even  a  man 
constitutionally  fearless  and,  when  issues  are 
clear,  very  prompt  in  action,  might  well  shrink 
from  murdering  his  uncle  in  cold  blood.  Mr. 
Robertson  quite  properly  asks  whether  all  the 
professors  who  rebuke  Hamlet  for  vacillation 
in  that  he  missed  an  early  chance  of  killing 
his  uncle  would  themselves  without  hesitation 
have  stabbed  a  man  in  the  back  whilst  he  was 
saying  his  prayers,  however  incestuous  a  beast 
he  may  have  been.  Even  looking  at  the  mattter 
from  their  own  point  of  view,  treating  Hamlet 
as  a  real  person,  "  not  Shakespeare's  creation 
but  God's,"  those  who  have  argued  in  so  many 
volumes  about  Hamlet's  weakness  of  will 
(largely  on  the  strength  of  his  own  distraught 
self -questionings)  show  a  deplorable  lack  of 
imagination.  And  it  is  lack  of  imagination  that 

[179] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

accounts  for  the  endless  discussions  as  to  whether 
Hamlet  was  mad:  that  is  to  say,  whether  cer- 
tain of  the  actions  imputed  to  Shakespeare's 
Hamlet  are  inconceivable  as  the  actions  of  a 
sane  man,  such  as  ourselves.  Do  they  know 
what  a  highly-strung  man  is,  or  what  horror  is? 
He  shams  lunacy  with  Polonius;  he  is  brutal 
to  Ophelia.  Reader,  have  you  never,  when  over- 
wrought, said  cruel  and  unjust  things  to  some- 
body you  loved;  have  you  never,  at  moments  of 
great  suffering  or  mental  irritation,  stopped  on 
the  tip  of  your  tongue  words  even  brutaller 
and  beastlier,  which  have  surged  up  in  a  hot 
wave  against  the  barrier  of  your  normal  sense? 
Suppose  it  were  your  mother  who  had  married 
your  father's  murderer;  suppose  the  revelation 
of  the  crime  had  come  to  you  suddenly  and  you 
were  charged  (for  the  ghost  is  there  and  real) 
to  avenge  it.  Suppose,  in  spite  of  your  con- 
viction, that  you  still  wanted  some  last  con- 
firmatory evidence  and  that,  whilst  you  awaited, 
you  were  racked  by  thoughts  of  all  the  evil  in 
the  world  and  the  impossibility  of  abolishing 
a  crime  by  revenge,  or  of  ever  quieting  your 
pain  again.  Suppose,  nevertheless,  that  you 
were  set  on  killing  the  beast  and  had  to  secure 
a  certain  opportunity.  You  might  retain,  as  a 
rule,  your  self-command;  be  capable  of  attend- 
[180] 


HAMLET 

ing  to  business  when  necessary,  or  acting  on 
sudden  emergencies;  have  quiet  intervals.  But 
might  you  not — especially  as  you  would  prob- 
ably be  unable  to  sleep  (a  thing  of  which  there 
may  be  a  hint  in  the  "  To  be  or  not  to  be  " 
speech) — be  liable  to  excesses  of  violent  temper, 
of  distracted  bitter  talk?  Dying,  Shakespeare's 
Hamlet  restrained  Horatio  from  suicide  with 
the  appeal: 

O  good  Horatio,  what  a  wounded  name, 

Things  standing  thus  unknown,  shall  live  behind  me. 

If  thou  didst  ever  hold  me  in  thy  heart 

Absent  thee  from  felicity  awhile, 

And  in  this  harsh  world  draw  thy  breath  in  pain 

To  tell  my  story. 

So  saying,  and  in  his  last  moments  making  a 
clear  political  arrangement  with  that  decision 
which  was  characteristic  of  him  when  faced 
by  simple  situations,  he  "  crack'd  his  noble 
heart."  But  his  appeal,  though  Horatio  doubt- 
less responded  to  it,  has  fallen  on  deaf  ears 
elsewhere;  and  it  is  his  eternal  fate  to  be  called 
a  coward  by  bookworms,  and  a  lunatic  by  the 
dull,  who  have  never  grasped  the  fact  that 
others  besides  lunatics  are  "  of  imagination  all 
compact."  He  has  been  as  unfortunate  in  his 
death  as  in  his  life. 

[181] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

IV:  Shakespeare's  Sonnets 

IT  is  twenty  years  since  Messrs.  Methuen,  with 
Mr.  W.  J.  Craig  as  editor,  began  the  publica- 
tion of  the  Arden  Shakespeare;  ten  since  Mr.  R. 
H.  Case  took  over  general  control  of  the  series; 
and,  I  should  think,  at  least  two  since  a  volume 
was  issued.  Mr.  C.  Knox  Pooler's  edition  of 
the  Sonnets  has  at  last  appeared.  It  is  a  good 
edition. 

The  notes  are  considerably  more  voluminous 
than  the  text.  This  is  not  always  a  merit  in  a 
poet's  editor;  and  it  necessitates  an  arrange- 
ment of  the  page  which  makes  the  edition  an 
inconvenient  one  for  ordinary  reading.  At  the 
same  time,  a  ir^an  who  should  habitually  read 
the  Sonnets  without  an  occasional  hankering 
for  a  fully  annotated  edition,  would  be  more 
than  human.  Both  their  nature  and  their  con- 
dition make  them  cry  out  for  explanation.  They 
appear  to  tell  a  story;  but  what  story?  They 
are  evidently  a  sonnet  sequence;  we  have  the 
sonnets,  but  almost  certainly  not  the  sequence. 
They  are  dedicated  by  the  printer  to  a  mys- 
terious person  whose  identification  might  or 
might  not  provide  a  clue  which  would  illuminate 
their  whole  content.  They  are  full  of  phrases 
which  need  explanation,  and  words  which  open 


SHAKESPEARE'S  SONNETS 

the  door  to  conjecture;  the  originals  of  the 
greater  portion  of  our  text  are  two  evidently 
corrupt  editions.  One  of  these  editions  was 
published,  apparently  by  a  pirate,  in  Shake- 
speare's lifetime;  the  other  by  an  ignoramus 
twenty-four  years  after  his  death.  On  all  sides 
we  are  besieged  by  questions.  For  whom  did 
Shakespeare  write  them?  Are  the  whole  of 
them  meant  to  hang  together?  Where  does 
euphuistic  compliment  end  and  passion  begin? 
Who  were  the  persons  mentioned,  including  the 
brother-poet?  Which  of  the  thousands  of  vari- 
ant readings  are  correct?  What  is  the  correct 
order?  And  even — though  this  is  not  commonly 
put — do  we  possess  the  whole  of  them? 

Mr.  Pooler  is  an  editor  of  the  cautious  and 
judicious  type.  His  notes  on  the  text — inter- 
pretations, variants,  parallel  passage — embody 
a  great  deal  of  what  is  valuable  in  the  work  of 
his  predecessors,  and  much,  uniformly  sensible, 
that  is  his  own.  On  more  general  questions, 
however,  he  inclines  to  summarise  the  arguments 
of  two  centuries  of  commentators  instead  of 
parading  theories  of  his  own.  One  positive  and 
exhaustive  argument  he  does  carry  through,  as 
I  think,  successfully.  He  argues,  as  against 
Sir  Sidney  Lee,  that  Benson  for  his  edition  of 
1640  had  no  other  materials  than  Thorpe's  1609 

[183] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

edition  and  The  Passionate  Pilgrim  (1599), 
which  contains  two  sonnets.  Prima  facie,  there 
is  a  good  deal  in  favour  of  Sir  Sidney  Lee's 
view:  Benson  leaves  out  some  sonnets,  mis- 
describes  many  in  head-lines,  muddles  them  up 
with  other  poems,  and  frequently  varies  the  text. 
But  most  of  his  exploits  can  be  explained  away 
as  the  stupidities  of  a  dolt  or  the  deliberate 
changes  of  a  knave.  Premising  that  "  one  blind 
beast  may  avoid  the  hole  into  which  another 
blind  beast  has  fallen,  but  it  cannot  fall  into 
the  same  hole  unless  it  is  going  over  the  same 
ground,"  Mr.  Pooler  collects  a  very  large  num- 
ber of  instances  to  show  that,  where  Thorpe  had 
committed  misprints  or  errors  of  punctuation 
which  play  havoc  with  the  sense,  Benson  contin- 
ually follows  him.  This  is  not  what  is  called  a 
"  mere  "  bibliographical  question.  For  in  Ben- 
son's edition,  to  put  it  briefly,  a  great  many  of 
the  "  he's  "  are  altered  into  "  she's,"  and  if  it 
could  be  proved  to  be  anything  more  than  a 
mere  adaptation  of  Thorpe's,  the  sex  of  the  per- 
son addressed  in  most  of  the  Sonnets  would  be 
more  open  to  doubt  than  it  is. 

The  theory  that  the  Sonnets  do  not  refer  to 
actual  occurrences,  often  propounded  (and  re- 
cently supported,  by  the  way,  by  Mr.  Asquith), 
does  not  seem  to  me  tenable;  I  do  not  think 


SHAKESPEARE'S  SONNETS 

that  a  poet  whose  own  personal  feelings  were 
not  directly  engaged  ever  produced  sonnets 
with  the  ring  that  these  have.  There  is  no 
justification,  on  the  face  of  the  poet's  statements 
or  in  the  general  spirit  which  permeates  the  son- 
nets, for  those  interpreters  who,  sometimes  from 
interested  motives,  have  detected  abnormality  in 
Shakespeare's  love  for  that  friend  of  whom  he 
said: 

And  for  a  woman  wert  thou  first  created 
Till  Nature,  as  she  wrought  thee,  fell  a-doting 
And  by  addition  me  of  thee  defeated.  .   .  . 

But  he  existed;  Shakespeare  urged  him  con- 
stantly to  marry;  and  there  was  a  breach.  In 
spite  of  all  the  fever  of  all  the  controversial- 
ists, we  do  not  know  who  he  was.  We  do  not 
even  know  whether  his  initials  were  W.  H.; 
Sir  Sidney  Lee  thinks  that  "  W.  H."  was  a 
seedy  hanger-on  of  the  publishing  trade.  Wheth- 
er the  "  Dark  Lady  "  has  ever  been  identified 
with  Anne  Hathaway,  Mr.  Pooler  does  not  say, 
and  I  do  not  know.  But  there  are  several  can- 
didates for  her  post,  and  at  least  six  for  that  of 
the  "  rival  poet."  The  amount  of  incidental  in- 
formation brought  to  light  by  all  their  support- 
ers has  been  enormous;  even  Baconian  research 
has  a  silver  lining.  But  nothing  near  proof  has 
ever  been  produced.  The  "  Dark  Lady  "  re- 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

mains  in  the  dark,  and  under  "  W.  H.'s  "  dedi- 
cation, as  under  Junius'  title,  the  motto  "  Stat 
nominis  umbra"  must  still  be  written. 

Possibly  the  mystery  will  never  be  solved. 
But  even  if  it  were,  a  greater  mystery  remains, 
and  one  that  envelopes  the  Plays  as  well  as  the 
Sonnets.  It  is  the  greatest  of  all  Shakespearean 
mysteries;  far  greater  than  the  mystery,  so  ob- 
sessing to  the  Baconians,  of  how  "  the  drunken 
illiterate  clown  of  Stratford  "  could  have  known 
so  much  law,  grammar,  and  classical  mythology. 
Why  was  the  greatest  of  all  poets  so  seemingly 
careless  about  the  perpetuation  of  his  texts; 
why  did  he  apparently  take  no  steps  to  get  the 
bulk  of  his  work  published  or  even  to  correct 
the  corrupt  versions  that  did  get  published? 
Why,  in  an  age  when  everybody  rushed  into 
print,  did  he  leave  his  manuscripts  about  to  die 
or  precariously  survive  like  foundlings?  In  any 
case,  had  he  never  said  a  word  about  his  art 
himself,  this  would  have  been  inexplicable,  in 
the  light  of  what  we  know  of  human  nature  and 
the  nature  of  poets.  But,  apart  from  that,  there 
is  plenty  of  quite  indisputable  detailed  evidence 
that  he  who  envied  "  this  man's  art  and  that 
man's  scope,"  and  who  spoke  of  the  "  proud  full 
sail  "  of  a  rival's  "  great  verse  "  revered  his  own 
calling.  More,  over  and  over  again,  in  the  Son- 
[.86] 


SHAKESPEARE'S  SONNETS 

nets  themselves  he  not  only  shows  that  con- 
sciousness of  his  own  powers  which  great  poets 
always  have,  but  definitely  anticipates  the  dura- 
bility of  what  he  has  written.  He  never  says 
that  he  is  writing  for  his  private  amusement 
or  relief  and  that  he  does  not  care  what  becomes 
of  his  work  or  whether  anyone  ever  reads  it: 
though  that  is  the  attitude  that  some  critics, 
anxious  not  to  admit  any  puzzle  insoluble,  have 
absurdly  imputed  to  him.  What  he  says  is: 

Not  marble,  nor  the  gilded  monuments 
Of  princes  shall  outlive  this  powerful  rhyme ; 
But  you  shall  shine  more  bright  in  these  contents 
Than  unswept  stone,  besmear'd  with  sluttish  time : 
When  wasteful  war  shall  statues  overturn, 
And  broils  root  out  the  work  of  masonry, 
Nor  Mars  his  word  not  War's  quick  fire  shall  burn 
The  living  record  of  your  memory. 
'Gainst  death  and  all  oblivious  enmity 
Shall  you  pace  forth ;  your  praise  shall  still  find  room, 
Even  in  the  eyes  of  all  posterity 
That  wear  this  world  out  to  the  ending  doom. 
So,  till  the  judgment  that  yourself  arise, 
You  live  in  this,  and  dwell  in  lovers'  eyes. 

"Who  will  believe  my  verse  in  time  to  come?" 
he  asks  again.  "  Do  thy  most,  old  Time,"  he 
says.  "  My  love  shall  in  my  verse  ever  live 
long."  '  To  times  in  hope  my  verse  shall  stand, 
Praising  thy  worth  "  : 

[187] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Your  monument  shall  be  my  gentle  verse, 
Which  eyes  not  yet  created  shall  o'er  read; 
And  tongues  to  be  your  being  shall  rehearse, 
When  all  the  breathers  of  this  world  are  dead; 
You  still  shall  live,  such  virtue  hath  my  pen, 
Where  breath  most  breathes,  even  in  the  mouths  of  men. 

And  where  he  is  not  promising,  but  hoping,  we 
see  the  confidence  behind  the  hope,  as  in  that 
sonnet  with  the  marvellous  beginning: 

Since  brass  nor  stone,  nor  earth,  nor  boundless  sea, 
But  sad  mortality  o'ersways  their  power, 
How  with  this  rage  shall  beauty  hold  a  plea, 
Whose  action  is  no  stronger  than  a  flower? 

He  had  written  in  some  of  these  sonnets  the 
greatest  lyric  verse  in  the  world,  and  he  knew 
it;  verse  which  in  its  effortless  fertility  of  image, 
its  "  inevitable "  directness  of  phrase,  its  per- 
fection of  rhythm,  must  be  the  idol  and  the  de- 
spair of  every  writer  who  reads  it  and  sees 
Shakespeare  doing  a  thousand  times  "  on  his 
head  "  what  he  himself  would  be  proud  to  do 
once.  There  are  contorted  sonnets;  there  are 
even  dull  ones;  but  the  best,  and  the  best  parts 
of  the  others  surpass  anything  in  English  poetry. 
And  they  were,  apparently,  the  by-product  of 
a  voluminous  professional  dramatist. 


THE  GREAT  UNFINISHED 

IT  is  announced  that  the  late  William  de  Mor- 
gan, who  became  a  good,  a  successful  and  a 
voluminous  novelist  at  an  age  when  most  men 
are  content  to  narrate  their  reminiscences  from 
a  chair,  left  two  unfinished  novels  behind  him. 
One  lacked  only  the  last  chapter ;  the  other  much 
more.  His  notes  for  the  missing  parts  were  in 
existence,  and  with  the  aid  of  these  his  widow 
(who  had  just  finished  the  work  when  she  died) 
completed  the  books. 

De  Morgan's  admirers  will  await  the  results 
with  curiosity.  Cases  are  not  uncommon  in 
which  husband  and  wife  acquire  similar  habits 
of  style  and  even  similar  physiognomies;  and 
every  congenial  couple  with  alert  minds  develop 
in  time  a  communal  sense  of  humour.  Each 
party  sees  humour  in  the  same  situations  and 
responds  to  them  in  the  same  phrases;  after 
many  years,  in  fact,  words  cease  to  be  necessary, 
and  the  simultaneous  joke  is  flashed  from  eye 
to  eye.  But  De  Morgan's  characterisation  was 
so  odd  and  his  method  of  writing  so  extremely 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

personal  that  I  cannot  conceive  that  there  will 
not,  however  faithfully  his  ideas  are  followed 
up,  be  very  marked  joins  where  his  script  ends 
and  Mrs.  de  Morgan's  begins.  But  I  do  not 
seriously  expect,  unless  the  novels  were  early 
ones,  that  we  shall  feel  much  regret  that  they 
were  never  finished  by  their  author.  The  age  at 
which  he  started  writing  was  an  advantage  to 
him  one  way:  his  first  books  had  the  benefit 
of  a  long  and  diverse  experience;  accumulated 
observations  poured  opulently  forth.  But  every- 
thing went  into  them;  he  was  looking  backward 
and  not  forward;  and  his  later  books  contained 
nothing  worth  having  that  was  not  in  Somehow 
Good  and  Joseph  Vance,  and  were  far  below 
them  in  quality. 

There  is  nothing  unusual  about  unfinished 
books.  Our  literature  is  strewn  with  them, 
from  Chaucer's  translation  of  the  "Romance  of 
the  Rose  to  Henry  James's  two  delicious  and 
tantalising  fragments.  Many  of  the  greatest 
works  in  literature  were  never  finished.  We 
have  only  a  half  of  the  Faerie  Queene  that 
Spenser  planned.  Virgil — which  is  not  sur- 
prising since  he  thought  he  had  done  a  good 
day's  work  if  he  had  written  twelve  lines — did 
not  complete  the  Mneid.  Byron's  Don  Juan 
leaves  off  at  a  situation  as  teasing  to  the  reader 
[190] 


THE  GREAT  UNFINISHED 

as  it  was  certainly  awkward  for  the  characters; 
and  his  Childe  Harold  was  never  completed  by 
him,  though  there  exists  a  French  continuation 
by  the  versatile  Lamartine.  Keats's  Hyperion, 
his  greatest  poem,  is  no  more  than  the  torso  of 
a  Titan,  and  we  lost  something  very  great  in 
the  missing  part  of  Shelley's  Triumph  of  Life. 
Wordsworth's  Excursion  is  incomplete;  of  Ma- 
caulay's  History  we  have  but  the  introduction 
and  the  first  full-length  section,  and  we  may 
never  get  such  a  history  of  Anne's  reign  as  the 
most  vivid  of  social  historians  would  have  writ- 
ten. Dostoieffsky's  Brothers  Karamazoff>  long 
as  it  is,  was  not  finished;  that  few  people  know 
this  is  probably  accounted  for  by  the  fact  that 
few  people  have  got  through  it.  Jane  Austen 
left  two  unfinished  novels;  and  the  list  might 
be  extended.  But  it  is  not  very  often  that  any- 
one has  the  courage  to  complete  the  unfinished 
work  of  a  good  writer.  It  is  done  occasionally. 
I  myself,  most  inexperienced  and  reluctant  of 
novelists,  have  lately  received  the  sacred  charge 
of  finishing  a  work  of  fiction  should  its  author 
(who,  I  am  sure,  will  survive  me  by  many 
years)  die  before  he  has  come  to  the  end  of  it. 
Marlowe's  Hero  and  Leander,  perhaps  the 
loveliest  poem  in  couplets  in  the  language,  was 
continued  by  Chapman,  with  results  that  did  not 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

justify  the  enterprise.  Peter  Motteux  tried  and 
failed  to  keep  up  to  that  unparalleled  level  of 
creative  translation  that  Sir  Thomas  Urquhart 
had  reached  in  the  early  books  of  Rabelais.  A 
play  of  Meredith's  was  licked  into  final  shape 
by  (I  hope  my  memory  is  not  at  fault)  Sir 
James  Barrie,  and  "  Q,"  who  was  unfortunate 
in  having  one  of  Stevenson's  duller  books  to 
cope  with,  finished  St.  Ives.  Nobody,  I  think, 
has  dared  attempt  an  end  to  Weir  of  Hermis- 
ton.,  an  enterprise  only  less  formidable  than 
would  be  that  of  rounding  off  a  novel  by  Miss 
Austen.  I  am  not  sorry  that  these  works  are 
left  as  they  were.  But  I  do  wish  that  some- 
body, anybody,  Mrs.  Dickens,  Miss  Dickens, 
Master  Dickens,  or  Wilkie  Collins,  had  finished 
Edwin  Drood,  for  then  we  should  have  been 
spared  this  eternal  controversy. 

It  breaks  out  yearly  like  prairie  fires;  you 
may  not  notice  where  it  starts,  but  at  more  or 
less  regular  intervals  you  are  suddenly  aware 
that  the  air  is  filled  with  smoke  and  flames. 
They  are  at  it  now,  for  the  ninety-ninth  time, 
in  the  Times  Literary  Supplement;  next  time 
it  may  be  in  the  Saturday  Review,  or  the 
Aihenceum,  or  the  Daily  Mail,  or  all  of  them 
at  once.  There  seem  to  be  tens  of  thousands 
of  persons  in  this  country  who  worry  over  the 
[192] 


THE  GREAT  UNFINISHED 

Drood  problem  as  chess  enthusiasts  do  over 
mates  in  five  moves.  And  the  extraordinary 
thing  is  that  they  have  a  way  of  talking  about 
the  mystery  of  Drood  and  his  latter  end  as 
though  they  were  talking  about  something  that 
really  happened. 

Now  I  do  not  see  why  men  should  not  amuse 
themselves  by  trying  to  elucidate  a  real  mys- 
tery. Researches  and  disputations  may  then  end 
in  discovery.  It  is  a  comprehensible  pastime  to 
attempt  to  identify  the  Man  in  the  Iron  Mask 
or  to  try  to  demonstrate  that  Sir  Philip  Francis 
did  or  did  not  write  the  Letters  of  Junius. 
Somebody  wrote  the  letters  of  Junius:  they 
exist;  new  evidence  or  fresh  examination  of  old 
evidence  may  (though  I  don't  think  it  will) 
conclusively  prove  who  was  the  author  of  those 
topical  polemics,  the  literary  merits  of  which  we 
are  all  agreed  in  so  grossly  exaggerating.  There 
are  still  people  who  think  there  was  something 
more  than  William  Sharp  behind  Fiona  Mac- 
leod.  There  are  still  those  who  think  that  Dr. 
Johnson,  when  he  said  that  he  "  would  not  be 
deterred  from  detecting  a  cheat  by  the  menaces 
of  a  ruffian,"  did  not  say  the  last  word  on  the 
Gaelic  origins  of  Macpherson's  Ossian.  They 
are  welcome  to  their  opinions,  and  they  are  en- 
titled to  wish  for  something  concrete  to  support 

[193] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

them.  But  it  is  a  totally  different  thing  to 
dispute  about  who  did  what  and  what  happened 
to  whom  in  an  uncompleted  story  which  is  not 
a  history  but  fiction.  The  common-sense  posi- 
tion is  that  nothing  whatever  happened  to  Edwin 
Drood,  that  he  himself  and  all  his  confreres  were 
the  acme  of  inactivity;  for  the  simple  reason 
that  there  were  (in  the  highly  appropriate  words 
of  their  own  fabulist)  no  sich  persons. 

It  is  of  course  a  great  tribute  to  Dickens's 
hypnotic  power  over  the  simple-minded  that  he 
should  have  been  able  to  persuade  people  that 
his  characters  were  actual  men  and  women  of 
whom  he  merely  chronicled  some  of  the  words 
and  deeds.  And  it  is  an  immense  compliment 
to  his  literary  craftsmanship  that  even  men  who 
do  not  forget  that  Drood  and  Company  were 
fictitious,  assume  that  his  art  was  so  perfect  and 
the  relation  between  cause  and  effect  in  his 
works  so  precise  that,  given  a  set  of  characters 
and  a  set  of  circumstances  provided  by  him,  one 
should  be  able  infallibly  to  deduce  what  remains 
undisclosed  from  what  the  novelist,  who  is  as 
true  to  nature  as  Nature  herself,  has  revealed. 
But  I  don't  think  that  even  Dickens's  literary 
craftsmanship  can  deserve  so  high  a  compliment 
as  all  that.  Nor  does  Dickens's  literary  con- 
science. Even  if  words  of  his  were  produced  giv- 
[194] 


THE  GREAT  UNFINISHED 

ing  such  and  such  an  explanation  of  the  problem 
and  the  mystery,  and  such  and  such  a  sketch  of 
the  end  of  the  book,  I  should  not  take  those  words 
as  gospel.  For  he  was  not  so  perfect  a  crafts- 
man (who  is?)  as  to  leave  himself  no  two  ways 
out  of  a  situation,  and  his  conscience  was  not 
so  relentless  as  to  prevent  him  from  producing 
the  most  unlikely  effects  from  his  causes,  if 
whim  or  expediency  made  him  feel  inclined  so 
to  do.  He  was  demonstrably  not  above  faking 
a  most  improbable  last  act  to  a  novel  in  order 
to  gratify  the  sentiment  of  the  public.  And  I 
refuse  to  believe  that  he,  who  could  make  almost 
any  character  do  almost  anything,  disguise  al- 
most any  man  as  some  other  man,  resurrect  the 
dead  and  transform  the  living,  would  not  have 
found  some  way  out  of  his  situation  which  no 
man  will  discover  by  sitting  down  and  exam- 
ining a  fragment.  The  problem  of  a  novelist's 
plot  is  not  like  a  chess  problem.  There  is  no 
mathematical  limit  to  the  novelist's  solution,  and 
the  novelist  has  no  rules  to  obey;  at  least  if 
there  are  rules  he  very  seldom  obeys  them. 


WALT  WHITMAN 

A  JAPANESE,  who  happened  to  be  visiting 
England  this  month  (July,  1919),  might  well 
think  that  one  of  the  most  established,  popular, 
and  closely  read  of  modern  authors  was  Walt 
Whitman.  He  would  be  wrong.  The  fact  that 
Whitman's  centenary  has  just  occurred  has  led 
all  the  critics  to  write  articles  about  him;  but  I 
suspect  that  it  is  years  since  most  of  them  even 
mentioned  his  name.  He  is  there  all  right — 
on  his  shelf,  classified  and  ticketed,  in  case  he 
should  be  wanted — recognised  as  one  of  the 
most  interesting  figures  in  American  history; 
but  I  doubt  if  he  is  currently  read  anything 
like  as  much  as  he  was  ten  or  fifteen  years  ago. 
Most  educated  men,  no  doubt,  have  dipped  into 
him.  A  good  many  writers  are  patently  under 
his  influence.  But  he  is  not  read  as  Keats, 
Shelley,  or  Tennyson  are  read,  and  his  influ- 
ence is  not  exercised  over  our  best  younger 
writers,  and  is,  moreover,  as  often  as  not,  indi- 
rect, operating  through  his  French  disciples 
upon  persons  who  probably  sneer  at  him.  If 


WALT  WHITMAN 

this  diagnosis  be  correct,  it  will  be  easy  to  find  a 
reason ;  and  the  reason  is  that  he  was  most  of  the 
time  a  bad  artist,  and  deliberately  a  bad  artist. 

He  said  a  good  many  things  about  his  own 
writings.  He  also  said,  "  Do  I  contradict  my- 
self? Very  well,  then,  I  contradict  myself."  I 
do  not  think,  however,  that  this  could  perti- 
nently be  quoted  against  one  who  should  see  a 
quite  fundamental  contradiction  between  those 
passages  in  which  he  spoke  for  all  the  world  as 
if  he  were  the  prophet  neither  of  America  nor 
of  democracy,  nor  of  anything  else,  and  those 
other  passages  in  which  he  bade  a  world  in  need 
of  regeneration  to  listen  to  his  "  barbaric  yawp." 
"  No  labour  machine,"  he  writes, 

Nor  discovery  have  I  made, 

Nor  will  I  be  able  to  leave  behind  me  any  wealthy  bequest  to 
found  a  hospital  or  library, 

Nor  reminiscence  of  any  deed  of  courage  for  America, 

Nor  literary  success  nor  intellect,  nor  book  for  the  book- 
shelf, 

But  a  few  carols  vibrating  through  the  air  I  leave, 

For  comrades  and  lovers. 

One  might  think  he  was  Burns  or  Herrick! 
Here  as  elsewhere  he  seems  to  forget  what  these 
"  few  carols  "  were  like.  Usually  it  was  impos- 
sible to  forget  it.  And  he  was  never  more 
truthful  than  when  he  said,  "  The  words  of  my 
book  nothing,  the  drift  of  it  everything." 

[197] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Unfortunately,  comrades  and  lovers,  poets 
and  lovers  of  poetry,  do  not  as  a  rule  find  last- 
ing nourishment  in  "  carols  "  of  which  the  doc- 
trine is  everything  and  the  words  nothing.  Art 
exists;  and  if  Whitman's  statement  were  liter- 
ally and  always  accurate,  nobody  would  read 
him  at  all,  for  his  sentences  would  not  convey 
his  meaning.  It  is  still  true  that  his  "  drift  "  is, 
in  the  mass  of  his  work,  the  most,  the  only  im- 
portant thing  about  him ;  and  "  drift "  has  a 
habit  of  getting  out  of  date.  When  one  says 
that  he  lost  by  throwing  over  the  whole  appa- 
ratus of  what  he  regarded  as  feudal,  monarchi- 
cal, European  poetry,  people  sometimes  sup- 
pose that  one  is  complaining  that  he  did  not 
write  in  rhyme.  That  is  absurd;  nor  as  a  rule 
did  Milton.  And  Whitman's  occasional  rhymes — 
as  in  O  Captain,  My  Captain,  Ethiopia  Saluting 
the  Colours,  and  The  Singer  in  the  Prison — 
are  not  so  elegant  as  to  make  anybody  wish  he 
had  attempted  more  of  them.  It  is  not  that.  It 
is  that,  though  he  had  a  natural  gift  for  beau- 
tiful rhythm,  he  customarily  wrote  a  sort  of 
spasmodic  prose,  and,  above  all  that,  attempted 
to  do  in  poetry  what,  at  any  rate  in  his  manner, 
could  not  be  done.  He  had  a  gospel — vague, 
but  vaguely  fine — of  democracy  and  of  Ameri- 
canism. He  tried  in  the  light  of  this  to  survey 


WALT  WHITMAN 

all  life  and  all  effort,  and  in  considerable  detail. 
"  I  will  report,"  he  said,  "  all  heroism  from  an 
American  point  of  view."  He  tried,  in  a  brief 
pemmicanising  way,  which  usually  excluded  the 
wealth  of  detail  which  might  have  made  such 
reports  interesting,  to  report  also  all  history, 
all  industrial  and  commercial  operations,  all 
navigation  and  science,  all  physical  experiences, 
and  even  all  geography;  and  by  adding  up  in- 
numerable small  statements  of  them  and  wrap- 
ping them  in  a  framework  of  democratic  rhet- 
oric. There  are  poems  of  his  which  read  like 
extracts  from  a  gazetteer  interspersed  with  the 
highest  flights  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George's  oratory. 
There  are  great  formless  masses  and  little  form- 
less fragments,  formless  in  general  outline  as 
they  are  in  detail — mere  exhortation  and  state- 
ments, having  no  artistic  (I  fall  into  his  phrase- 
ology!) rapport.  Possibly  a  diet  of  Leaves  of 
Grass  is  neither  sustaining  nor  digestible;  but 
it  is  certainly  not  eatable. 

Few,  I  think,  except  critics  in  search  of 
themes  and  desperate  men  in  search  of  a  creed, 
will  in  the  future  read  and  re-read  the  enormous 
mass  of  Walt's  carols.  But  it  will  be,  in  a  man- 
ner, kept  afloat.  Firstly,  because  of  his  per- 
sonality. It  is  quite  true  that  "  This  is  no  book. 
Who  touches  this  touches  a  man."  There  were 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

affectations  about  him.  A  great  deal  of  the 
time  one  feels  that  his  sounding  rhetoric  is  some- 
thing hollow:  that  he  is  "  yawping  "  as  loud  as 
he  can  to  keep  up  his  convictions,  if  not  his  cour- 
age. And  his  cultivated  mannerisms  are,  after 
the  first  attraction  of  their  quaintness  has 
passed,  repulsive.  "  Camerado,"  "  Libertad," 
"  Omnes,  omnes,"  and  the  rest  of  the  jargon; 
how  does  it  square  with  his  assertion,  for  he 
meant  to  assert  this,  that  he  chose  the  first  spon- 
taneous words  he  found?  He  may  have  shaken 
the  dust  of  the  Old  World  from  his  feet  (which 
had  never  trodden  it),  but  this  did  not  stop  him 
from  calling  a  pavement,  in  an  English  poem, 
a  "  troittoir,"  nor  did  it  prevent  him  from  spell- 
ing "  cosmos  "  with  a  "  k,"  presumably  because 
he  had  heard  that  the  Greeks  did  so;  he  even 
went  to  the  length  of  spelling  Canada  with  a 
"  K ,"  which  the  Greeks  might  have  done  had 
they  had  a  chance,  but  which  would  scarcely  be 
deemed  a  natural  thing,  even  by  a  Spelling  Re- 
former. "  Me  imperturbe,  standing  at  ease  in 
Nature  " ;  "  Melange  mine  own,  the  unseen  and 
the  seen " ;  a  man  who  was  only  unself -con- 
sciously trying  to  convert  people  would  not  con- 
coct preposterous  openings  like  those;  and  such 
sentences  ("No  dainty  dolce  affetuoso  I,"  says 
he!)  are  sprinkled  all  over  his  works.  Yet,  at 
[200] 


WALT  WHITMAN 

bottom,  he  was  genuine  and  original;  he  said 
things  that  needed  courage  to  say  and  things 
which  it  gives  courage  to  read.  He  will  never 
again  come  with  the  freshness  of  appeal  that  he 
had  forty  or  fifty  years  ago.  Men  then,  shad- 
owed by  "  the  Victorian  compromise,"  hunger- 
ing for  something  audacious  and  brutal,  were 
intensely  thrilled  by  this  voice,  which  came  over 
the  ocean  crying,  "  I  loaf  and  invite  my  soul," 
"  I  dote  on  myself,  there  is  that  lot  of  me  and 
so  luscious,"  proclaiming  the  most  intimate  of 
his  physical  sensations  and  unveiling  the  most 
shameful  of  his  hypocrisies.  We  have  got  used 
to  self-exposure  and  philosophic  egoism  since 
then;  Whitman's  uniqueness  is  less  extensive 
and  remarkable  than  it  was.  But  he  remains  a 
man  peculiar  and  great,  and,  in  spite  of  all  his 
efforts,  a  poet.  The  gold  is  scattered  all  over 
that  great  heap  of  quartz,  and  a  few  poems  or 
sections  of  poems  are  gold  all  through.  There 
are  Out  of  the  Cradle  Endlessly  Rocking,  The 
Two  Veterans,  When  Lilacs  First  in  the  Door- 
yard  Bloomed,  Beat,  Beat  Drums;  a  few  more. 
Any  stanza  of  the  Dirge  might  be  quoted: 

"  Lo  the  moon  ascending,  up  from  the  east 
the  silvery  round  moon  beautiful  over  the  house- 
tops, ghastly,  phantom  moon,  immense  and 
silent  moon. 

[201] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

"  I  see  a  sad  procession,  and  I  hear  the  sound 
of  coming  full-key 'd  bugles,  all  the  channels  of 
the  city  streets  they're  flooding,  as  with  voices 
and  with  tears. 

"  I  hear  the  great  drums  pounding,  and  the 
small  drums  steady  whirring,  and  every  blow 
of  the  great  convulsive  drums  strikes  me  through 
and  through." 

But  two  things  must  be  remarked.  One  is 
that  when  men  quote  Whitman  or  anthologise 
extracts  from  him,  it  is  from  the  same  few 
poems  over  and  over  again  that  they  quote.  And 
the  other  is  that  these  are  all  poems  in  which 
Whitman  fell  (even  when  the  verse  is  "  free") 
into  poetic  rhythms  and  sometimes  even  into  tra- 
ditional stanza  forms.  And  they  are  poems 
in  which  he  did  what  all  must  do  who  success- 
fully "  carol "  for  comrades,  lovers,  or  anybody 
else;  poems  in  which  he  wrote  from  the  heart, 
localised  the  objects  he  was  describing,  and  saw 
them  clearly,  communicated  emotion  instead  of 
throwing  a  Dictionary  and  ten  thousand  Com- 
mandments at  the  intellect,  and  achieved  the 
highest  effects  of  art  by  the  right  use  of 
"  words,"  and  the  total  neglect  of  what  he  nor- 
mally regarded  as  his  "  drift." 

[202] 


ROHMER 

A  YEAK  or  two  ago  I  drew,  or  attempted  to 
draw,  attention  to  the  peculiar  qualities  of  Mr. 
Sax  Rohmer.  Only  in  a  casual  and  parentheti- 
cal way,  however,  for  I  was  ostensibly  writing 
about  something  else.  A  holiday,  during  which 
my  brain  has  required  and  received  rest,  has 
brought  me  back  to  him.  I  unfortunately  left 
at  home  half -read — if  this  personal  interpolation 
may  be  pardoned — his  latest  work.  I  saw 
enough  of  it  to  be  relieved  of  my  fear,  engen- 
dered by  the  last  I  had  read  (The  Orchard  of 
Tears),  that  Mr.  Rohmer  was  going  to  desert 
his  natural  province  and  attempt  to  emulate 
Miss  Corelli,  an  operation  for  which  he  is  not 
designed.  But  the  advantage  of  liking  a  really 
popular  author  like  Mr.  Rohmer  is  that  one 
can  find  his  books,  in  cheap  editions,  on  even 
the  most  Philistine  of  railway  bookstalls,  where 
Chesterton,  Richard  Jefferies,  and  even  Dick- 
ens are  names  at  which  the  clerk  gapes  in  be- 
wilderment or  boredom.  I  had  therefore  no  dif- 
ficulty, at  various  stopping-places,  in  furnishing 
myself  with  the  old  familiar  friends,  The  Mys- 

[203] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

tery  of  Dr.  Fu-Manchu,  The  Yellow  Claw, 
Tales  of  Secret  Egypt,  The  Devil  Doctor,  and 
The  Si-Fcm  Mysteries.  This  last  I  am  now 
reading.  How,  I  wonder  again,  can  any  man 
with  a  taste  for  the  nightmarish  and  phantas- 
magoria!, and  the  desire  of  an  occasional  escape 
from  the  necessity  of  exerting  his  own  intellect, 
deny  that  Mr.  Rohmer  is  as  competent  a  mer- 
chant of  shocks  as  exists? 

The  Si-Fan  Mysteries  is  good  all  through. 
It  even  does  what  all  good  shockers  do  when 
their  villains  are  too  good  to  waste,  disposes  of 
its  villain  in  such  a  manner  that,  although  pre- 
sumably dead,  he  may  well  turn  up  again — 
like  Sherlock  Holmes.  It  begins  in  a  London 
hotel,  where  a  diploirfat,  worn  to  a  shadow  by  a 
horrible  secret,  lies  dying.  It  ends  in  a  cave 
of  the  sea  with  pursuers  hot  on  the  heels  of  pur- 
sued, the  lot  frustrated,  the  last  diabolical  wea- 
pon foiled.  Between  this  beginning  and  this  end 
we  have  met  the  Man  with  the  Limp  and  the 
deadly  Flower  of  Silence.  We  have  spent  agi- 
tated hours  in  the  Chinatown  joy-shop,  watched 
burglaries  and  poisonings,  chased  cabs,  and 
heard  strange  knockings.  We  have  learned  the 
secret  of  the  Golden  Pomegranates  and  waited 
while  Sir  Baldwin  Frazer  operated,  under  com- 
pulsion, on  Fu-Manchu's  brain.  We  have 
[204] 


ROHMER 

rushed  from  the  empty  little  house  by  the  Bald- 
win, to  the  house  at  Wadsworth,  the  cafe  in 
Soho,  the  Room  with  a  Golden  Door,  and  the 
dungeons  of  Greywater  Park.  No  ingenuity, 
no  method  of  transport,  and  no  adjective  has 
been  spared.  And  if  we  notice,  we  notice  with 
gratitude  and  a  compliment,  that  almost  the 
whole  of  the  book's  long  action  has  been  con- 
ducted at  night,  or,  failing  night,  in  thick  fog. 
There  are,  to  put  it  politely,  distinct  flaws  in 
Mr.  Rohmer's  style.  His  sentences  are  often 
so  spasmodic,  his  words  so  repetitive,  that  one 
sometimes  suspects  him  of  dictation.  In  several 
of  his  books,  including  The  Si-Fan  Mysteries, 
there  is  a  character  named  Nayland-Smith.  His 
status  is  odd:  he  appears  to  be  a  Burmese  civil 
servant  who  gets,  whenever  Mr.  Rohmer  wants 
him,  indefinite  leave  from  some  undefined  au- 
thority in  order  to  tackle  problems  that  are  a 
little  abstruse  for  Scotland  Yard.  He  is  tall, 
lean,  long  of  jaw;  he  has  a  habit,  on  almost 
every  page,  of  either  "  loading "  his  pipe  or 
letting  fall  the  match  with  which  he  is  about  to 
light  it.  A  careful  artist  would  not  repeat  these 
things  so  often  as  Mr.  Rohmer  does;  even  the 
most  patient  reader  is  apt  sometimes  to  wish 
that,  for  once,  Nayland-Smith  would  break  the 
monotony  by  employing,  on  the  one  hand,  a 

[205] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

cigar  or  a  cigarette,  or,  on  the  other,  a  patent 
lighter.  Nay  land- Smith's  mode  of  expressing 
himself  is  as  little  varied  as  his  "  business  with 
hands  and  pipe."  I  extract  a  few  specimens 
from  pp.  122-123  of  The  Si-Fan  Mysteries: 

"  Take  my  hand,"  he  snapped  energetically. 
"  Sit  tight  and  catch,"  rapped  Smith. 
"Come  on,  Weymouth!"  rapped  Nayland- 
Smith. 

"  You  don't  have  to,"  snapped  Smith. 

Very  seldom  indeed  does  Nayland-Smith  say, 
cry,  continue,  resume,  observe,  rejoin,  remark, 
reply,  or  interject.  I  find  him  occasionally  mut- 
tering or  jerking,  but  the  immense  majority  of 
his  sentences  are  either  rapped  or  snapped. 
This,  quite  apart  from  the  fact  that  it  might 
well  have  put  his  companions  off  their  game, 
becomes  so  irritating  that  the  reader  would  wel- 
come anything,  anything,  for  a  change — even 
the  "he  husked"  and  "he  hoarsed "  of  Mr. 
Leacock's  celebrated  burlesque. 

Here  are  some  of  Mr.  Rohmer's  defects;  I 
suppose  I  had  better  add,  though  I  personally 
am  corrupt  enough  to  delight  in  them,  the  truly 
terrible  words  that  he  invents.  In  one  of  his 
books,  all  the  well-known  shuddery  words  hav- 
ing been  worn  to  rags,  he  finds  it  necessary,  in 
[206] 


ROHMER 

order  to  get  one  more  thrill  out  of  the  exhausted 
nerves,  to  begin  describing  things  as  "  bee- 
tlesque."  His  shadows  are  "  cloisteresque,"  his 
music  is  "  luresome,"  and  the  trackers  on  the 
roof  of  the  Cafe  de  1'Egypte  look  down  on  "  the 
teemful  streets  of  Soho."  But  what  of  that? 
Words  are  Mr.  Rohmer's  slaves,  not  his  mas- 
ters. He  uses  them  as  a  great  painter  uses  his 
colours;  he  is  bound  by  no  conventions,  but 
thinks  only  of  the  effects  at  which  he  is  aiming. 
And  he  achieves  them.  There  are  many  writers 
of  cheap  shockers  as  reckless  of  English,  as  un- 
trammelled by  considerations  of  "  verisimili- 
tude," as  resolved  to  get  six  thrills  to  the  page, 
as  debonair  in  the  constant  use  of  old  materials 
which  themselves  or  others  have  found  satisfac- 
tory, as  Mr.  Rohmer.  We  know  elsewhere — 
oh!  how  plentifully  elsewhere — these  mysterious 
Chinese,  these  Oriental  brass  boxes,  these  opium 
dens — hells,  I  should  say — these  wharves  by  the 
foggy  Thames,  these  police  boats  and  floating 
corpses,  these  palatial  hotels  (I  should  say  khans 
or  caravanserais)  with  their  suave  managers, 
these  underground  tunnels,  these  furtive  serv- 
ants, these  rope-ladders  and  blow-pipes,  these 
rooms  in  the  Temple,  these  boomings  of  Big 
Ben  at  midnight.  We  know,  how  well, 
that  distraught  girl  in  the  rain  with  the  black 

[207] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

scarf  over  her  head  and  that  other  hussy, 
dark-eyed,  with  the  voluptuous  lips  and  the 
snake  bangle,  who  is  "  probably  a  Eurasian." 
But  when  we  meet  them  in  Mr.  Rohmer  they 
have  an  extra  touch  of  vividness  that  they  lack 
elsewhere.  It  is  he,  and  not  his  rivals,  who  has 
left  permanently  impressed  on  my  imagination 
the  picture  of  a  man  shamming  sleep  in  an 
opium  den  whilst  the  local  siren,  with  death  in 
her  hands,  lifts  his  eyelids  to  test  him;  the  pic- 
ture of  a  bony  yellow  arm  thrust  into  the  moon- 
light in  a  high  room.  And,  to  do  him  justice, 
he  has  not  left  the  shocker-maker's  cabinet  of 
properties  where  he  found  it.  The  Chinese  sci- 
entific genius  who  kidnaps  illustrious  English 
doctors,  hypnotises  them  and  makes  them  work 
for  the  dominance  of  the  Yellow  Race  is,  I  think, 
a  novel  conception.  The  wholesale  importation 
of  Oriental  spiders,  scorpions,  and  snakes  into 
an  English  baronet's  premises  has  not,  I  believe, 
been  done  before.  And  some  of  Dr.  Fu-Man- 
chu's  scientific  inventions  are  indisputably  new, 
notably  that  memorable  cross  between  a  fungus 
and  a  microbe,  used  in  that  case  where  the  fun- 
gus fell  like  dust  on  the  explorers  and  instan- 
taneously began  to  spread  cankerously  over  all 
their  flesh.  I  could  give  others,  only  one  should 
not  queer  the  pitch.  But  I  have  said  enough,  I 

[208] 


ROHMER 

hope,  to  indicate  that  Mr.  Rohmer — though  his 
morals  are  uniformly  as  sound  as  those  of  all 
melodramatists — has  as  vivid  and  unwholesome 
an  imagination,  as  fecund  a  spring  of  morbid 
invention,  as  any  writer  in  the  cheap  series  or 
out  of  them.  Of  course,  if  one  examines  his 
plots  and  his  machinery  with  the  cold  eye  of  a 
scientific  investigator  one  will  very  probably 
arrive  at  the  conclusion  that  all  would  not  have 
happened  just  as  he  says  it  does,  that  his  char- 
acters would  not  in  all  cases  have  behaved  as 
he  makes  them,  and,  particularly,  that  the  idio- 
cies committed  in  these,  as  in  all  mystery  books, 
by  the  paladins  fighting  on  the  side  of  the 
angels,  in  order  to  give  the  villains  a  good  run, 
might  in  most  cases  have  been  avoided.  But 
readers  who  examine  the  art  of  the  fabulist  in 
this  manner  should  avoid  Mr.  Rohmer.  He  is 
not  for  the  pedant.  He  is  for  those  who  can 
fall  under  his  spell  sufficiently  to  believe  what- 
ever he  says.  Of  that  company  I  am  one. 

The  book  is  open  before  me.  The  last  sen- 
tences on  the  page  catch  my  eye.  The  trapdoor 
is  softly  closed.  The  men  stand  over  the  panes 
of  the  skylight: 

"  Look,"  he  said,  "  there  is  the  house  of 
hashish  " — 

I  shall  stop  writing  this,  and  go  on  from  there. 

[209] 


POPE 

IN  a  Leslie  Stephen  lecture  published  by  the 
Cambridge  University  Press,  Mr.  J.  W.  Mac- 
kail  attempts  and  gives  a  fresh  survey  of  the 
problem  of  Pope.  It  was  time  someone  did. 
The  reaction  still  lasts,  and  there  is  still  current 
the  view  of  Pope  as  a  poet  of  the  reign  of  Queen 
Anne  whose  demise  was  almost  as  final  as  his 
sovereign's,  a  spiteful  little  man  of  some  wit, 
who  wrote  interminable,  maddeningly  monoto- 
nous couplets,  which,  when  they  were  not  about 
Grub  Street,  were  concerned  with  nymphs, 
swains,  groves,  the  finny  tribe,  and  the  con- 
scious main.  A  widespread  view ;  not,  of  course, 
the  view  of  any  man  at  all  familiar  with  Pope. 
But  even  those  who  have  read  him  do  not  com- 
monly do  justice  to  his  native  powers  or  recog- 
nise the  elements  in  him  of  a  quite  other  kind 
of  poet — a  poet  of  large  imagination,  alive  to 
natural  beauty  and  the  mystery  of  life. 

Mr.  Mackail's  lecture  would  be  serviceable 
did  it  do  no  more  than  call  attention  to  Pope's 
earlier  works,  and  to  the  fact  that  it  was  by 
[210] 


POPE 

those  that  his  best  contemporaries  thought  that 
he  would  live.  Those  later  works  with  which 
Pope's  name  is  now  chiefly  associated  contain 
stray  passages  noble  in  conception,  in  diction, 
in  march ;  the  end  of  the  Dunciad  testifies  to  the 
eye  that  saw  and  the  hand  that  executed,  years 
earlier,  that  vision  of  the  happy  solitary  who 

Bids  his  free  soul  expatiate  in  the  skies, 
Amid  her  kindred  stars  familiar  roam, 
Survey  the  region,  and  confess  her  home. 

Frequently  in  the  Homer,  and  sometimes  later, 
we  have  instances  of  his  accurate  observation 
and  most  felicitous  translation  of  natural  ob- 
jects; the  couplet 

Lo  where  Maeotis  sleeps,  and  hardly  flows 
The  freezing  Tanais  through  a  waste  of  snows 

was  Pope's  own  favourite,  which  shows  that  his 
judgment  remained  sound  to  the  last.  But  in 
those  early  works,  which  are  now  so  often  ig- 
nored, but  on  which,  we  should  not  forget,  his 
contemporary  fame  was  chiefly  based,  beauty  is 
frequent,  and  "  the  singing  voice." 

Mr.  Mackail  quotes  "  Wher'er  you  walk,"  a 
quatrain  unsurpassable  for  delicate  grace.  But 
he  might  have  taken  his  quotations  from  almost 
anywhere  in  Windsor  Forest,  the  Pastorals,  or 

[211] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

The  Rape  of  the  Lock.  His  quatrain  can  al- 
most be  equalled  from  the  third  Pastoral: 

Oft  on  the  rind  I  carved  her  amorous  vows, 
While  she  with  garlands  hung  the  bending  boughs : 
The  garlands  fade,  the  vows  are  worn  away, 
So  dies  her  love,  and  so  my  hopes  decay, 

and  both  Windsor  Forest  and  the  Pastorals  are 
full  of  examples  of  his  feeling  for  a  certain  kind 
of  landscape  and  his  art  in  conveying  it.  All 
the  Forest  passages  about  hunting,  fishing,  trees 
and  birds  might  be  quoted.  This  is  character- 
istic in  subject,  though  the  double  "  while  "  is 
weak  and  those  oxen  are  lifted  from  Comus: 

Here  where  the  mountains,  lessening  as  they  rise, 
Lose  the  low  vales,  and  steal  into  the  skies: 
While  labouring  oxen,  spent  with  toil  and  heat, 
In  their  loose  traces  from  the  field  retreat, 
While  circling  smokes  from  village-tops  are  seen 
And  the  fleet  shades  glide  o'er  the  dusky  green. 

Mr.  Mackail  suggests  that  he  has  been  disliked 
for  using  the  diction  of  his  own  age,  and  not 
that  of  another  age.  There  is  something  in  this, 
but  it  is  also  true,  not  only  that  he  did  the  best 
things  best,  but  that  when  he  is  at  his  finest  his 
diction  is  least  peculiarly  of  his  own  time. 

Pope  began  with  a  great,  not  the  greatest, 

equipment.    In  spite  of  his  occasional  grandeurs 

it  is  likely  that,  had  he  matured  as  he  began,  he 

would  have  become  at  all  events  one   of  the 

[212] 


POPE 

greatest  of  pastoral  poets,  a  poet  covering  in 
his  landscape  the  range  from  Claude  to  Wat- 
teau,  seldom  far  from  Dresden  in  his  figures, 
and  making  music  akin  to  that  of  the  French 
and  Venetian  composers  of  his  century.  But  he 
did  not  mature.  It  was  not,  as  has  been  sup- 
posed, that  he  either  was  or  became  entirely  a 
man  with  tastes  and  no  feelings,  artificial  and 
urban.  He  did  not  lose  the  sense  which  made 
him  write  of  a  character : 

Tired  of  the  scene  parterres  and  fountains  yield, 
He  finds  at  last  he  better  likes  a  field. 

But  his  interests  did  shift,  and  his  sensibilities 
did  become  atrophied;  he  turned  his  back  on 
beauty;  his  music  became  rarer.  Concurrently 
his  versification  hardened.  The  drying  up  of 
the  singing  impulse  left  his  verse  rigid;  all  his 
art  and  critical  sense  could  not  supply  that  flow 
and  sway  into  which  emotion  would  have  car- 
ried his  verse  automatically.  His  passion  had 
never  been  strong;  the  couplet,  with  him,  would 
always  have  been  a  dangerous  instrument;  but 
when  his  subjects  ceased  to  move  him  there  was 
nothing  to  prevent  his  fondness  for  neatness 
getting  the  better  of  him.  A  man  can  never  be 
too  careful  about  accuracy  of  phrasing;  and  all 
good  poets  correct.  But  correction  became  a 

[213] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

mania  with  Pope,  and  it  was  correction  mis- 
placed. He  trimmed  until  almost  every  couplet 
looked  like  almost  every  other  couplet.  He 
spoke  of 

that  unwearied  mill 
That  burn'd  ten  thousand  verses 

with  more  truth  than  he  knew.  It  was  then 
that  he  was  making  poetry  that  "  mere  mechanic 
art "  against  which  Cowper  and  Keats  revolted. 
The  couplet  got  hold  of  him,  the  Muse  let  him 
go,  and  he  developed  vices  which  a  thousand 
slavish  imitators  copied. 

The  Muse  let  him  go.  Mr.  Mackail  gives 
several  reasons  why  Pope  did  not  become  a  very 
great  poet.  He  refers  to  the  unlyrical  quality 
of  his  age,  the  cramping  effect  of  "  his  method 
of  distillation  and  concentration,"  and  his  "  low 
vitality  ";  but  he  gets  nearest  to  the  fundamen- 
tal thing  when  he  speaks  of  his  "  artificially  lim- 
ited scope  of  interest,"  matter  reacting  on  style. 
Temperament  was  at  the  bottom  of  his  failure 
to  fulfil  his  promise.  He  brought  himself  into 
a  state  of  mind  unfavourable  to  the  highest  kind 
of  production.  There  is  a  phrase  in  one  of  the 
epistles : 

at  night 
Fools  rush  into  my  head  and  so  I  write. 

[214] 


POPE 

The  consummate  cleverness  of  his  satire  could 
never  be  disputed.  It  may  be  argued  that  he 
sometimes  polished  and  heightened  his  invective 
too  much.  But  as  a  rule  he  seizes  weaknesses 
with  an  infallible  malice,  and  crystallises  them 
into  perfect  phraseology.  Everybody  knows  the 
marvellous  passage  about  Addison,  the  "  damn 
with  faint  praise"  passage;  probably  no  poet 
in  any  language  has  strung  together  so  compact, 
so  pregnant,  so  witty  a  series  of  epigrams.  All 
his  satirical  works  are  thick  strewn  with  exam- 
ples of  that  power  of  saying  an  acid  thing  with 
the  utmost  possible  compression.  They  are 
plentiful  in  the  Epistle  to  Arbuihnot,  an  exam- 
ple being  his  tribute  to  small  critics  who  write 
about  great  authors : 

Even  such  small  critics  some  regard  may  claim, 
Preserved  in  Milton's  or  in  Shakespeare's  name. 
Pretty!  in  amber  to  observe  the  forms 
Of  hairs,  or  straws,  or  dirt,  or  grubs,  or  worms ! 
The  things,  we  know,  are  neither  rich  nor  rare, 
But  wonder  how  the  devil  they  got  there. 

What  ease  there  is  in  such  couplets  from  the 
Dunciad  as: 

While  pensive  poets  painful  vigils  keep. 
Sleepless  themselves,  to  give  their  readers  sleep, 

and  the  demolishing  lines  on  Settle,  the  City 
poet,  who  celebrates  a  civic  pageant: 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Now  night  descending,  the  proud  scene  was  o'er, 
B-ut  lived,  in  Settle's  numbers,  one  day  more. 

But  marvellous  though  his  satire  was,  it  was 
the  symptom  of  a  disease.  "  Fools  rush  into 
my  head."  That  became  his  condition.  He 
turned  away  from  the  great  themes,  he  lost  the 
habit,  if  never  entirely  the  capacity,  of  contem- 
plating and  responding  to  the  sublime  and  the 
lovely  in  nature  and  the  heart  of  man.  Lacking 
that  "  fierce  indignation  "  which  Swift  professed 
and  often  felt,  he  spent  his  days  and  nights 
thinking  splenetically  of  people  who  had  of- 
fended him  and  people  whose  only  offence  was 
that  they  had  no  brains.  He  came  to  wear  a 
permanent  sneer;  he  developed  a  preference  for 
saying  a  biting  rather  than  a  beautiful  thing; 
he  chose  to  be  satirical,  and  he  became,  though 
to  the  last  he  was  liable  to  make  an  exquisite 
phrase  or  to  glide  briefly  into  sublimity,  a  satir- 
ist pure  and  simple.  If  a  man  constantly  prac- 
tises satire,  that  is  bound  to  be  his  fate;  he  may 
have  many  moods,  but  if  the  satirical  mood  be- 
comes a  habit  of  mind  he  is,  as  a  poet,  done  for, 
for  poetry  is  the  fruit  of  love,  sympathy,  humil- 
ity, and  awe,  which  are  no  qualities  for  a  witty 
scourger  of  fools. 


GOD  SAVE  THE  KING 

THE  controversy  about  the  National  Anthem 
has  broken  out  once  more.  Everybody  admits 
that  the  words  of  the  existing  anthem — its  Ger- 
man tune  has  a  certain  massive  dignity  when 
sung  by  a  large  crowd — are  weak.  Even  in  the 
first  verse : 

Send  him  victorious, 
Happy  and  glorious 
Long  to  reign  over  us 

would  appear  extremely  crude  to  us  were  it  not 
hallowed  by  long  usage.  Mrs.  Browning  her- 
self never  perpetrated  a  worse  rhyme.  And  as 
for  the  rest,  where  it  is  not  clumsy  it  is,  to  mod- 
ern sensibilities,  offensive.  People  point  out 
that  when  we  are  at  peace  with  the  world  it  is 
wantonly  brutal  for  us  to  sing — in  the  most 
solemn  and  feeling  way,  too — those  lines  which 
are  the  most  direct  and  vigorous  of  the  lot: 

Confound  their  politics, 
Frustrate  their  knavish  tricks, 

whilst,  session  by  session,  the  King  announces 
from  the  throne  "my  relations  with  foreign 

[217] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Powers  continue  to  be  friendly."  The  thing 
should  be  rewritten,  we  are  told;  we  should  have 
a  more  competently  written  poem  as  our  An- 
them, and  one  that  should  embody,  not  the  pas- 
sions of  1719,  but  the  loftiest  aspirations  of  1919. 
From  time  to  time,  therefore,  new  versions  ap- 
pear. The  latest  was  sung  the  other  day  "  under 
official  auspices."  The  author  of  the  new  verses 
kept  his  name  dark,  and  when  he  heard  what 
people  said  about  them  he  must  have  congratu- 
lated himself  upon  his  reticence. 

Certainly  his  effort  was  very  feeble.  But  I 
do  not  think  those  newspaper  critics  who  de- 
mand that  the  Poet  Laureate,  or  Mr.  Kipling, 
or  Mr.  Smith  should  produce  us  a  fine  new 
anthem  quite  understand  the  difficulty  of  the 
task.  We  may  waive  the  general  difficulty  of 
doing  things  to  order,  and  admit  that  a  great 
many  people  have  written,  deliberately  and  in 
response  to  a  demand,  ceremonial  verses  per- 
fectly adapted  to  their  purpose.  But  any  Na- 
tional Anthem  must  be  a  peculiar  thing,  and  our 
own  presents  special  difficulties,  which  we  will 
come  to  later. 

The  first  thing  to  be  observed  is  that  your 
words  must  be  singable,  and  the  second  is  that 
they  must  be  capable  of  being  understood  by, 
and  sympathetically  sung  by,  the  whole  popu- 


GOD  SAVE  THE  KING 

lation.  The  author  is  not  to  express  his  purely 
personal  sentiments,  nor  the  feelings  or  concep- 
tions of  any  particular  class,  defined  by  locality, 
political  views,  or  education.  He  may  (to  take 
extreme  illustrations)  wish  that  God  should  con- 
vert the  King  to  Judaism,  or  that  the  King 
should  make  war  upon  the  Japanese;  but  these 
are  not  amongst  the  common  and  abiding  de- 
sires of  the  generality  of  Englishmen.  He  may, 
when  he  looks  for  what  is  central  in  the  Eng- 
land that  he  loves,  think  of  Chaucer  and  Shake- 
speare, of  Milton's  Areopagitica,  of  Magdalen 
Tower,  the  oaks  of  Sussex,  or  village  churches 
at  evening  with  rooks  flying  about  their  elms. 
But  he  cannot  mention  them;  the  personal,  or 
sectional,  quality  in  imagination  or  taste  must  be 
avoided;  and,  by  the  same  token,  all  words  not 
in  common  use,  all  images  that  to  a  labourer 
would  seem  recondite,  and  even  all  metrical  de- 
vices that  would  puzzle  the  simple.  He  is  to 
find  the  Greatest  Common  Measure  of  the 
poetical;  and,  by  the  time  he  has  found  it  along 
his  line  of  search  there  will  probably  be  very 
little  poetry  left.  The  sentiments  of  a  National 
Anthem  must  be  sentiments  understood  and 
shared  by  at  least  a  majority  of  the  English- 
speaking  inhabitants  of  the  empire;  they  must 
be  above  dispute,  except  by  cranks,  they  must 

[219] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

be  as  comprehensive  as  possible,  and  they  must 
focus  as  great  a  portion  as  possible  of  the  emo- 
tions and  thoughts  that  all  patriotic  men  have 
about  the  empire,  its  merits,  and  its  functions 
in  the  world. 

So  there  is  no  chance  for  the  specific  or  the 
picturesque.  Many  men  have  failed  with  the 
National  Anthem  by  trying  to  give  it  a  beauty 
of  detail  which  it  literally  is  not  capable  of  bear- 
ing. Possibly  the  most  skilfully  written  of  all 
new  versions  was  that  of  the  late  James  Elroy 
Flecker.  His  second  verse  ran: 

Thou  in  his  suppliant  hands 
Hast  placed  such  Mighty  Lands : 

Save  thou  our  King! 
As  once  from  golden  Skies 
Rebels  with  flaming  eyes, 
So  the  King's  Enemies 

Doom  thou  and  fling. 

And  in  the  later  verses  he  cast  his  thought  on 
the 

Few  dear  miles 
Of  sweetly-meadowed  Isles, 

celebrating  the  loveliness  of  each  kingdom.  That 
his  version  is,  as  a  poem  to  be  read  or  spoken, 
immeasurably  superior  to  the  old  version  a  child 
could  see.  Yet  the  better  it  is  the  worse  it  is. 

[220] 


GOD  SAVE  THE  KING 

Those  subtle  effects,  those  chosen  epithets,  those 
efforts  of  the  imagination,  are,  in  a  popular  an- 
them for  singing,  all  wrong.  They  would  hold 
the  singer  up;  his  attention  would  be  detained 
by  single  words;  and,  beyond  all  this,  he  would 
certainly  be  too  sheepish  and  self-conscious  to 
sing  such  words.  A  large  congregation  could 
only  sing  this  version  when  men  had  got  so  accli- 
matised to  it  that  they  never  thought  of  its 
meaning.  In  the  ideal  anthem,  to  be  sung  nat- 
urally by  all  men,  the  poet  must  put  common- 
places in  a  manner  which  will  be  simple  and 
clear  without  being  too  banal. 

Here  is  a  task  difficult  enough,  whatever  the 
metre  and  whatever  the  time.  But  he  who 
would  compose  new  verses  to  God  Save  the  King 
has  a  heavier  handicap  still.  His  words  must 
not  merely  be  singable,  but  they  must  be  sing- 
able to  that  loud  tune,  with  its  series  of  hard 
thumps  with  a  trip  at  the  end  of  each.  And  they 
must  be  written  in  a  very  constricting  metre. 
The  end  of  the  line  is  problem  enough.  It  al- 
most compels  the  use  of  misplaced  stresses.  But 
the  beginning  is  a  fetter.  Each  line  must  start 
with  an  emphatic  word.  It  would  be  prepos- 
terous to  come  down  with  such  a  whack  upon 
"  And,"  or  indeed  any  conjunctive  or  unimpor- 
tant syllable ;  and  the  result  of  this  is  that  each 

[221] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

line  must  almost  necessarily  be  a  complete  phrase 
without  run  over. 

The  difficulties  and  the  perils  being  such, 
failure  being  so  easy  and  success  so  unlikely,  the 
wonder  is  that  anybody  but  an  innocent  or 
a  vainglorious  simpleton  should  be  courageous 
enough  to  try  his  hand  at  the  reformation  of  our 
Anthem.  But  such  is  the  attraction  of  the  diffi- 
cult, such  the  force  of  patriotism,  and  so  pow- 
erful the  dislike  of  the  existing  Anthem,  that 
even  the  most  sensitive  and  fastidious  artists 
are  tempted  by  the  problem.  I  recently  spent 
some  days  with  two  who  had  settled  down  to  it 
with  the  determination  not  to  stop  until  they 
had  produced  something  satisfactory.  Either 
of  them  could  write  finely  of  patriotism;  both, 
in  fact,  have  done  so;  but  not  all  their  love  of 
England  and  enlightened  ideals  seemed  to  be 
availing  them  here,  and  their  delicate  ears 
seemed  to  be  rather  an  impediment  than  other- 
wise with  that  ruthless  tune  dragging  their  sylla- 
bles after  it.  If  they  produce  good  and  inter- 
esting poems,  as  they  will  end  by  doing,  then* 
next  step  will  be  to  knock  out  all  the  original 
lines  and  substitute  trite  ones,  to  replace  most 
of  their  concrete  words  by  abstract  ones  (thus 
reversing  the  usual  rule),  and  to  substitute  for 
all  epithets  which  have  flavour  adjectives  look- 
[222] 


GOD  SAVE  THE  KING 

ing  quite  ordinary.  When,  finally,  they  have 
achieved  anthems  which  are  acceptable  as  to  sen- 
timents, mention  all  the  agreed  and  large  things, 
omit  all  else,  and  can  be  spoken  with  as  little 
attention  to  the  particular  words  as  one  gives 
when  one  says  "  Pass  the  butter,"  they  will 
probably  find  it  difficult  to  distinguish  the  re- 
sults of  their  labours  from  the  dull  effusions  of 
the  many  poetasters  who  have  essayed  the  same 
task.  They  will  look  a  little  atrabiliously  at 
those  strings  of  vapid  observations  about  the 
wide  Empire  (or  "Empire  wide" — to  scan), 
Truth,  Justice,  Liberty,  Freedom,  Union,  Love, 
and  Peace,  punctuated  by  those  periodic  God 
Saves,  they  will  ask  themselves  whether  it  was 
for  this  that  Heaven  gave  them  brains  and  the 
gift  of  Poetry,  and  they  will  ultimately — though 
people  do  stumble  on  miracles — think  it  best  to 
destroy,  or  at  least  to  conceal,  the  proofs  of 
their  failure  to  perform  the  impossible  and  their 
lamentable  success  in  producing  the  bad. 


[223] 


MIDSHIPMAN  EASY 

IT  was  hot  weather.  I  had  intended  to  read  a 
book  about  education.  But  the  sun  withered 
up  my  inclination,  and  casting  about  for  some- 
thing which  I  should  certainly  be  able  to  enjoy, 
and  which  would  not  demand  from  me  an  intel- 
lectual effort  to  which  I  felt  unequal,  I  bor- 
rowed a  copy  of  Midshipman  Easy,  which  I  had 
read  many  times,  but  not  for  years  past.  I 
found  it  better  than  ever,  and  could  not  help 
wondering  how  it  is  that  Marryat  is  so  often 
treated  as  no  more  than  a  slightly  superior 
Henty,  who  concocted  "  adventure  stories  "  for 
boys  and  was  an  effective  recruiting  agent  for 
the  Royal  Navy. 

If  there  is  in  the  English  language  a  book  of 
the  adventurous  kind  more  full  of  exciting  fights 
and  escapes,  freer  from  dull  pages,  more  diversi- 
fied, more  amusing,  and,  I  may  add,  better  writ- 
ten, I  do  not  know  it.  It  may  certainly  be 
argued  that  the  adventures  are  very  crowded, 
that  luck  unduly  favours  the  hero,  and  that  the 
good  characters  are  exceptionally  good;  but  it 
[224] 


MIDSHIPMAN  EASY 

is  as  realistic  as  a  book  of  the  sort  could  be,  and 
if  nothing  is  to  happen  in  novels  that  could  not 
happen  in  normal  life,  we  should  have  a  tedious 
time  of  it.  The  characters  are  slight,  and  some 
of  them  are  caricatures;  but  that  is  bound  to  be 
so  if  incident  is  what  a  writer  is  mainly  con- 
cerned with,  and  Marryat  seems  to  me  to  give 
as  good  pictures  of  his  people  as  is  conformable 
with  the  nature,  pace,  and  rapid  change  of  his 
story.  As  an  inventor  of  good  incident  not  even 
the  Stevenson  of  Treasure  Island,  not  even,  I 
think,  Dumas,  could  beat  him  at  his  best.  And 
in  Midshipman  Easy  he  was  at  his  best  all  the 
time. 

Think  of  the  succession  of  episodes  we  have 
been  through  before  we  have  come  to  the  end; 
Jack's  early  escapades,  his  encounter  with  Mr. 
Bonnycastle,  his  first  burst  at  the  Blue  Posts,  his 
battles  with  Vigors,  his  three-cornered  duel  with 
the  bo'sun  and  the  swell  mobsman,  some  of  the 
finest  little  sea-fights  in  literature;  the  "Duty 
before  Decency "  incident,  the  cruise  with  the 
mutineers  who  were  cowed  by  ground-sharks, 
the  rescue  of  the  three  ladies  and  the  hoisting  of 
the  green  petticoat  (the  emblem  of  equality), 
the  fight  with  the  padrone  and  his  men  in  the 
speronare,  the  heroic  siege  in  Sicily  when  the 
galley  slaves  battered  their  way  from  floor  to 

[225] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

floor — there  are  all  these  and  a  hundred  minor 
excitements  which  were  all  a  part  of  the  day's 
work;  and  thrown  in  are  the  history  of  Mesty — 
Mephistopheles  Faust,  the  Ashantee  chief — and 
the  blood-curdling  story  of  Don  Rebeira.  Hun- 
dreds of  characters  of  several  nations  have 
crossed  the  scene,  and  glimpses  have  been  given 
of  half  the  Mediterranean,  and  the  whole  per- 
formance has  been  accomplished  unerringly.  No 
discursion  or  discussion  is  ever  kept  up  a  minute 
too  long  to  keep  the  reader's  attention,  and  the 
actual  writing  is  so  good  that  it  is  difficult  to 
understand  that  it  does  not  receive  more  notice. 
I  will  quote  the  very  first  paragraph  of  the 
book: 

"  Mr.  Nicodemus  Easy  was  a  gentleman  who 
lived  down  in  Hampshire;  he  was  a  married 
man  and  in  very  easy  circumstances.  Most 
couples  find  it  very  easy  to  have  a  family,  but 
not  always  quite  so  easy  to  maintain  them.  Mr. 
Easy  was  not  at  all  uneasy  on  the  latter  score, 
as  he  had  no  children;  but  he  was  anxious  to 
have  them,  as  most  people  covet  what  they  can- 
not obtain.  After  ten  years,  Mr.  Easy  gave  it 
up  as  a  bad  job.  Philosophy  is  said  to  console  a 
man  under  disappointment,  although  Shake- 
speare asserts  that  it  is  no  remedy  for  tooth- 
[226] 


MIDSHIPMAN  EASY 

ache;  so  Mr.  Easy  turned  philosopher,  the  very 
best  profession  a  man  can  take  up,  when  he  is 
fit  for  nothing  else ;  he  must  be  a  very  incapable 
person  indeed  who  cannot  talk  nonsense.  For 
some  time  Mr.  Easy  could  not  decide  upon  what 
description  his  nonsense  should  consist  of;  at 
last  he  fixed  upon  the  rights  of  man,  equality, 
and  all  that;  how  every  person  was  born  to  in- 
herit his  share  of  the  earth,  a  right  at  present 
only  admitted  to  a  certain  length;  that  is,  about 
six  feet,  for  we  all  inherit  our  graves,  and  are 
allowed  to  take  possession  without  dispute.  But 
no  one  would  listen  to  Mr.  Easy's  philosophy. 
The  women  would  not  acknowledge  the  rights  of 
men,  whom  they  declared  always  to  be  in  the 
wrong;  and,  as  the  gentlemen  who  visited  Mr. 
Easy  were  all  men  of  property,  they  could  not 
perceive  the  advantage  of  sharing  with  those 
who  had  none.  However,  they  allowed  him  to 
discuss  the  question,  while  they  discussed  his 
port.  The  wine  was  good,  if  the  arguments 
were  not,  and  we  must  take  things  as  we  find 
them  in  this  world." 

Could  there  be  a  brisker  opening,  a  livelier, 
cleaner  narrative  style?  The  whole  chapter  is 
a  model;  the  concluding  paragraph  as  terse, 
businesslike,  and  sufficient  as  could  be: 

[227] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

"  In  due  course  of  time,  Mrs.  Easy  presented 
her  husband  with  a  fine  boy,  whom  we  present 
to  the  public  as  our  hero." 

The  epigrammatic  economy  of  the  style  is  pre- 
served throughout  the  book.  There  is  no  strain- 
ing after  phrases.  Marryat  scatters  freely  little 
mots  like,  "  A  man  who  is  able  and  willing  to 
pay  a  large  tavern  bill  will  always  find  follow- 
ers— that  is  to  the  tavern  " ;  but  these  always 
arise  directly  out  of  the  narrative — are  never 
(as  it  were)  stuck  on.  There  is  none  of  that 
terrible  sermonising  which  adds  immeasurably 
to  the  tedium  of  Henty  and  W.  H.  G.  Kings- 
ton, and  is,  no  doubt,  supposed  to  be  "  good  for 
boys."  Marryat  closes  his  discussions  like  this: 
"  Here  an  argument  ensued  upon  love,  which  we 
we  shall  not  trouble  the  reader  with,  as  it  was 
not  very  profound,  both  sides  knowing  very 
little  on  the  subject."  But  we  can  stand  more 
talk  from  Marryat's  heroes  than  from  those  of 
any  writer  of  mere  "  books  for  boys."  For  in- 
stance, Jack's  philosophisings  about  the  rights 
of  man,  the  ratiocinations  by  which  he  consoles 
himself  in  the  most  uncomfortable  predicaments 
are  done  with  delicious  lightness.  A  typical  ex- 
ample comes  early,  when,  after  practising  his 
father's  equality  notions  at  the  expense  of  the 

[228] 


MIDSHIPMAN  EASY 

farmer's  apples,  he  tumbles  down  the  well,  and, 
at  the  bottom,  soliloquises: 

"  '  At  all  events/  thought  Jack,  *  if  it  had 
not  been  for  the  bull,  I  should  have  been 
watched  by  the  dog,  and  then  thrashed  by  the 
farmer;  but  then  again,  if  it  had  not  been  for 
the  bull,  I  should  not  have  tumbled  among  the 
bees,  and  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  bees,  I  should 
not  have  tumbled  into  the  well ;  and  if  it  had  not 
been  for  the  chain,  I  should  have  been  drowned. 
Such  has  been  the  chain  of  events,  all  because 
I  wanted  to  eat  an  apple. 

'  However,  I  have  got  rid  of  the  farmer, 
and  the  dog,  and  the  bull,  and  the  bees — all's 
well  that  ends  well;  but  how  the  devil  am  I  to 
get  out  of  the  well  ?  All  creation  appear  to  have 
conspired  against  the  rights  of  man.  As  my 
father  said,  this  is  an  iron  age,  and  here  I  am 
swinging  to  an  iron  chain.' ' 

Where  has  that  method  been  seen  since?  There 
is  something  of  it  in  Peacock.  But  where  had 
it  been  seen  before?  The  answer  is  obvious  to 
anyone  who  is  familiar  with  the  novels  of  Vol- 
taire. I  am  not  sufficiently  acquainted  with  the 
biography  of  Marryat  to  know  if  there  is  evi- 
dence that  he  had  read  Voltaire.  But  his  mode 

[229] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

of  narration  is  most  obviously  derived  from  Vol- 
taire, and  the  relations  between  Easy  pere  and 
Jack  were,  I  should  say,  almost  unquestionably 
suggested  by  those  between  Dr.  Pangloss  and 
Candide.  It  is  a  far  cry  from  the  subversive 
sceptic  of  Ferney  to  the  English  post  captain; 
but  stranger  connections  have  been  estab- 
lished. 

Marryat  is  unduly  neglected.  Midshipman 
Easy  is  beyond  doubt  his  masterpiece ;  but  Peter 
Simple  runs  it  very  hard.  These  and  Poor  Jack 
and  the  Pirate,  and  the  Three  Cutters  certainly 
seem  to  me  as  works  of  art,  as  stories,  and  as 
pictures  of  life,  fully  equal  to  the  novels  of 
Smollett,  even  when  one  remembers  Humphry 
Clinker.  Yet  Peregrine  Pickle  and  Roderick 
Random,  little  though  they  may  be  read,  are 
treated  as  classics  in  all  text-books,  whilst  Mar- 
ryat usually  has  to  be  contented  with  a  para- 
graph or  a  mere  "  mention  "  in  a  list.  Is  it  be- 
cause his  books  interest  boys  and  are  therefore 
supposed  to  be  fit  for  no  one  else?  Perhaps  he 
would  be  taken  a  little  more  seriously  in  this 
age  of  propaganda  if  the  fact  were  recalled  that 
he  consciously  (though  not  excessively)  worked 
with  a  purpose.  He  desired  not  only  to  write 
amusing  and  exciting  books,  but  to  expose  the 
brutalities  and  injustices  of  the  Old  Navy;  and, 
[230] 


MIDSHIPMAN  EASY 

just  as  the  effects  of  Mr.  Galsworthy's  Justice 
were,  by  ministerial  admission,  immediately  evi- 
dent in  prison  legislation,  so  Marryat's  The 
King's  Own  led  to  changes  in  naval  administra- 
tion, as  the  Admiralty  frankly  acknowledged. 


[231] 


JANE  CAVE 

I  WAS  rummaging  on  a  bookstall.  I  opened 
a  book  in  faded  boards  and  was  struck  by  a 
remarkable  frontispiece  plate.  It  represented 
an  eighteenth-century  lady  seated  before  a  large 
volume  and  holding  a  quill  pen  in  an  impossibly 
placed  hand.  Her  hair  was  elaborately  dressed ; 
on  her  shoulders  she  wore  a  lace  wrap,  on  her 
head  something  like  a  beribboned  lamp-shade, 
and  on  her  face  a  seraphically  complacent  smile. 
The  title-page  was  inscribed :  "  Poems  on  Vari- 
ous Subjects,  Entertaining,  Elegiac,  and  Re- 
ligious. By  Jane  Cave.  Winchester:  Printed 
for  the  Author  by  J.  Sadler,  1783."  This  was 
enough.  I  bought  the  book  and  found  it 
remarkable. 

Internal  evidence  suggests  that  this  Miss  Cave 
was  a  Methodist  of  Welsh  extraction,  that  she 
held  some  superior  household  post,  and  that  she 
was  freely  admitted  to  the  society  of  her  em- 
ployers and  their  friends,  though  she  "  never 
forgot  the  deference  due  "  to  those  "  in  a  sta- 
tion above  her."  "  Soft  affluence,"  she  ex- 

[232] 


JANE  CAVE 

plains  (in  a  poem  to  an  unkind  lady  who 
doubted  if  she  composed  the  poems  to  which 
her  name  was  attached),  had  not  been  her  lot. 
But  the  Muse, 

tho'  she  is  a  guest  majestic 
May  deign  to  dwell  in  a  domestic. 

Nevertheless,  she  explains  elsewhere,  she  works 
under  difficulties.  No  sooner  has  she  felt  in- 
spiration than  Duty  intervenes: 

Now  Duty's  call  I  never  must  refuse, 

I  rise — and  with  a  blush  myself  excuse. 

She  lived,  like  Jane  Austen,  in  a  small  world; 
but,  in  spite  of  all  impediments,  she  got  enough 
out  of  that  world  to  show  her  quality. 

Her  amorous  and  narrative  poems  are  slightly 
disappointing.  She  employs  the  sham  Latin 
names  then  in  vogue;  a  betrayed  maiden  is 
"  Credulia  "  and  her  betrayer  "  Perfidio."  These 
poems  are  mostly  banal;  it  is  when  she  is  writ- 
ing of  actual  events  and  experiences  that  she 
becomes  truly  herself.  A  young  soldier  marries 
a  young  woman, 

Who  proof  remains  'gainst  cannon  balls  and  fire, 
May  by  one  glance  from  Sylvia's  eyes  expire. 

Here  she  addresses  the  man;  in  another  epi- 
thalamium  she  hails  the  lady  who  (this  is  the 
final  crashing  couplet)  will  never  regret: 

[233] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

That  you  declin'd  the  pleasing  name  of  B — m 
And  that  alone  preferred  of  H — rag — m: 

The  blanks  appear  in  the  original;  she  little 
knew  when  she  wrote  that  130  years  afterwards 
a  man  would  spend  half  a  morning  trying,  and 
failing,  to  complete  the  surnames  which  made, 
by  so  remarkable  a  coincidence,  that  useful 
rhyme.  She  was  very  adaptable.  She  wrote 
for  one  person  a  rebuke  to  a  surly  housemaid; 
for  another  a  poem  on  Castles.  It  is  a  fine 
performanc3,  but  put  in  the  shade  by  her  long 
metrical  account  of  an  excursion  to  a  Ducal 
Seat  at  Itchen.  "  The  morn  did  a  bad  day 
portend,"  but  it  cleared  up.  They  had  lunch, 
and  then  started  for  the  mansion,  where  they 
experienced  all  the  proper  emotions: 

A  while  we  after  dinner  sat, 

Engaged  in  inoffensive  chat, 

Then  arm  in  arm,  in  pairs  we  stalk, 

And  to  his  Grace's  mansion  walk. 

Here,  each  apartment  we  behold, 

Doth  something  of  the  Duke  unfold. 

Magnificence  decks  ev'ry  place, 

And  speaks  the  owner  is  his  Grace. 

Some  ancient  portraits  caught  my  eye, 

Which  bid  my  bosom  heave  a  sigh, 

For  ah !  those  once  lov'd  forms  with  reptiles  lie. 

What  a  synonym! 

Miss  Cave  was  versatile.     She  wrote  a  poem 
on  seeing  Lady  P.  at  church,  where  she  was 

[234] 


JANE  CAVE 

agreeably  surprised  to  find  that  (in  spite  of 
her  rank)  Lady  P.  did  not  laugh  or  chatter; 
she  wrote  another,  "  On  Hearing  Prophane 
Cursing  and  Swearing."  But  death  was  her 
favourite  subject.  The  elegiac  note  is  all- 
pervading,  especially  in  a  lament  for  a  gardener 
who  had  left  his  favourite  sphere  for  a  better 
world,  Miss  Cave  having  the  thankless  task  of 
catechising  his  plants  as  to  his  whereabouts: 

Hot-house  or  greenhouse,  next  I  aske  of  you 
But  ye  unwilling  are  to  tell  me  too, 
Of  ev'ry  plant,  and  tree,  and  flower  I  ask, 
But  none  will  undertake  the  painful  task. 

This  is  odd  enough,  but  I  doubt  if  there  exists 
in  the  language  so  strange  a  series  of  elegies 
and  epitaphs  as  Miss  Cave  groups  together  at 
the  end  of  her  volume.  Some  of  them  have 
lay  subjects.  There  was  a  bereaved  mother 
to  whom  each  sympathetic  herb  and  plant  ad- 
dressed consolation: 

Prepare,  she  cries — prepare  to  meet  the  blest, 
And  join  your  Sally  in  eternal  rest. 

But  clergymen  were  her  peculiar  forte.  White- 
field  was  the  most  notable  of  her  subjects; 
the  rest  were  obscure  clerics  who,  unfortunately, 
all  had  names  that  were  incongruous  with  high- 
flown  surroundings.  There  was  one,  the  Rev. 
Howel  Harris: 

[235] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Advanc'd  beyond  their  frowns,  beyond  their  praise, 
Harris  with  Angels  tunes  his  grateful  lays. 
He  sits  with  all  those  radiant  hosts  above, 
And  swims  in  seas  of  pure  celestial  love. 

He  certainly  deserved  his  promotion;  his  feats 
on  earth  are  celebrated  with  unconscious  blas- 
phemy when  Miss  Cave  hopes : 

That  God  from  aye,  to  aye,  may  carry  on 
Th'  amazing  work  which  Harris  hath  begun. 

A  fellow-subject,  or  victim,  was  the  Reverend 
Mr.  Watkins.  On  earth  he  left  a  gap.  All 

With  whom  he  did  in  Christian  union  meet 
The  death  of  Watkins  greatly  must  regret. 

On  the  other  hand: 

Hark !  how  the  Heavenly  choir  began  to  sing 
A  song  of  praise,  when  Watkins  entered  in. 

I  wonder  what  was  the  motive  of  the  man  who 
suggested  that  so  solemn  a  poetess  and  precise 
a  moralist  should  tackle  (as  she  once  did)  the 
subject  of  Love  and  Wine,  Venus  and  Bacchus? 
I  don't  think  that  "  P.  G.,  Esq.,  of  Winchester," 
to  whom  is  attributed  the  suggestion,  can  have 
been  entirely  serious.  I  see  Miss  Cave  as  a 
person,  vain  as  Mr.  Collins  and  voluble  as  Miss 
Bates,  apt  to  go  into  a  huff,  very  conscious  of 
her  own  acquirements,  in  spite  of  her  large  as- 

[236] 


JANE  CAVE 

sumption  of  modesty.  "  P.  G.,  Esq."  was  tired 
of  her  presence  and  her  tongue,  I  think;  and 
when  she  coyly  asked  him  what  he  would  like 
her  to  write  about,  he  named  that  most  unsuit- 
able of  themes,  and  she — unaware  of  the  twitch- 
ing on  his  lips — at  once  attempted  it. 

Whoever  and  whatever  she  was  she  was  cer- 
tainly a  nailer.  Her  book  is  badly  produced, 
the  pages  go  in  and  out,  so  that  one  is  always 
turning  over  several  at  a  time.  It  is  obvious 
that  she  feared  this  when  she  was  reading 
her  proofs.  It  made  her  angry,  and  on  the 
"  Errata  "  page  appears  the  following  "  Adver- 
tisement ": 

;'  Whereas  the  Printer  of  this  work  did  en- 
gage with  the  Author  that  it  should  be  printed 
and  completely  finished  in  an  elegant,  masterly 
manner,  on  a  new  type  and  good  paper,  all 
the  same  sort,  size,  and  colour.  Therefore,  if 
upon  inspection  it  is  found  not  answerable  to 
the  above  engagement,  the  Printer  has  violated 
his  agreement,  deceived  and  disappointed  the 
Author,  and  is  wholly  accountable  for  the 
defect." 

It  must  have  been  a  very  strong-minded  woman 
who  was  able  to  compel  her  publisher  to  eat 

[237] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

dirt  in  public  like  this.  But  she  must  have  had 
her  consolations.  Her  list  of  subscribers  in- 
cludes about  two  thousand  names,  and  even  at 
that  several  hundred  names  arrived  too  late  for 
insertion.  She  groups  them  by  towns:  there  are 
hundreds  from  Oxford,  Salisbury,  and  Win- 
chester, and  little  contingents  from  Cowes,  Gos- 
port,  Fareham,  Newbury,  and  other  places. 
The  "  travelling  "  of  the  book  must  have  been 
scientifically  managed ;  never  in  history,  I  should 
think,  have  so  many  copies  of  so  utterly  feeble 
a  book  been  sold  in  advance.  And  now  nobody 
knows  it! 


[238] 


GALLERIES 

ME.  JOSEPH  DUVEEN  has  presented  the  na- 
tion with  a  sum  of  money  to  build  a  Gallery 
of  Modern  Foreign  Art.  It  is  certainly  needed. 
The  neglect  of  modern  foreign  art — especially 
French  and  Dutch  art — has  not  been  complete 
in  this  country;  British  collectors  were  early 
to  appreciate  the  Barbizon  school,  and  in  the 
last  fifteen  years  there  has  certainly  been  enough 
writing  and  exhibiting  to  familiarise  the  public 
with  the  nature  of  almost  everything  that  has 
been  done  in  Europe  in  our  time.  But,  owing 
to  lack  of  money,  or  conservatism,  or  timidity, 
or  all  of  these,  it  is  just  to  say  that  for  our 
National  Gallery  modern  painting  does  not 
exist.  One  or  two  donors  have  presented  us 
with  a  few  pictures  by  Corot,  Daubigny,  Diaz, 
and  the  Marises;  Courbet  may  be  found  at 
South  Kensington  and  a  few  provincial  gal- 
leries have  gone  a  little  farther.  But  it  is 
nobody's  business  to  watch  what  is  being  done 
and  to  see — to  put  it  crudely — that  we  get  in 
early  and  cheap.  As  things  stand  there  are 

[239] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

masters,  recognised  as  such  by  competent  per- 
sons in  every  country,  who  are  quite  unrepre- 
sented in  the  national  collections,  and  of  whom, 
if  things  went  on  as  they  are,  we  should,  fifty 
years  hence,  be  buying  inferior  examples  at 
prodigious  prices.  We  need  not  have  been 
quite  so  badly  off  as  we  are.  If  Dr.  Bode  was 
able — as  he  was — to  acquire  pictures  by  Cezanne 
and  hang  them  at  Berlin  (Cezanne  and  his  con- 
temporaries are  also  to  be  seen  at  Munich),  and 
if  the  Rejks  Museum  at  Amsterdam  found  van 
Gogh  worthy  of  a  room  to  himself,  it  is  clear 
that  the  care  of  a  collection  of  old  masters,  and 
the  liking  for  them,  does  not  necessarily  pre- 
clude a  judgment  upon  and  taste  for  what  has 
been  done  quite  recently.  But  our  National 
Gallery  has  laboured  under  obvious  difficulties, 
and  a  new  gallery  and  separate  control  is  the 
obvious  solution.  There  will  be  little  difficulty 
in  starting  such  a  collection.  France,  Belgium, 
and  Holland  will  provide  the  obvious  basis, 
Corot  and  his  contemporaries,  the  Marises, 
Mauve,  probably  Israels  and  Bosboom.  The 
more  venerable  critics  will  be  shocked  when  (as 
they  will  have  to)  Gaugin  and  Cezanne  get 
in ;  but  they  will  scarcely  lift  their  voices  against 
Renoir  and  Degas — who,  if  I  remember  rightly, 
are  still  totally  unrepresented  in  London. 
[240] 


GALLERIES 

There  are  dozens  of  other  Frenchmen  of  all 
sizes  from  Manet  to  Boudin  and  Cazin.  Spain, 
Sweden,  and,  if  we  are  really  enterprising, 
Russia,  will  provide  something.  It  will  not  be 
necessary  to  buy  anything  German.  Since 
Diirer  and  Altdorfer  it  can  only  be  supposed 
that  German  painters  have  written  music.  Len- 
bach  was  a  good  academic  portrait  painter; 
Menzel  (whom  they  attempted  to  pass  off  as  a 
great  master),  a  skilful,  if  dull,  illustrator;  the 
colour  of  the  romantic  Bocklin  has  to  be  seen 
to  be  believed;  and  the  best  of  the  living  Ger- 
mans would  not  be  conspicuous  in  our  current 
art  shows.  We  must  be  grateful  for  the  new 
gallery;  but  I  should  like  to  add  a  few  qualify- 
ing remarks. 

To  illustrate  the  limitations  of  these  huge 
public  collections  a  parallel  from  literature  may 
be  drawn.  They  are  like  anthologies.  The 
National  Gallery  resembles  one  of  those  works 
which  give  in  five  or  ten  volumes  representative 
selections  from  the  world's  Greatest  Masters, 
specimens  drawn  from  all  countries  and  periods. 
The  Tate  Gallery  is  like  an  anthology  of  nine- 
teenth century  literature;  the  new  Duveen  Gal- 
lery will  be  like  a  volume  of  selections  from 
modern  foreign  writers.  Picture  galleries  have 
disadvantages  peculiar  to  themselves,  of  course. 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

If  they  are  overcrowded  with  pictures,  one  can- 
not escape  the  clash  and  confusion  by  "  open- 
ing "  a  wall  at  one  place  and  then  shutting  it 
up  again;  if  they  are  overcrowded  with  people 
concentration  is  difficult.  And  in  the  ordinary 
way,  so  much  trouble  and  time  are  involved 
in  reaching  them,  that  the  visitor,  not  knowing 
when  he  will  be  there  again,  is  faced  with  the 
necessity  of  either  rushing  through  them  or 
getting  tired  limbs  and  a  crick  in  the  neck.  But 
their  principal  defect  as  an  element  in  "  artistic 
education "  is  inseparable  from  their  principal 
merit;  they  cover  too  much  ground  and  they 
cover  it  inadequately.  Large  and,  within  their 
reference,  "  complete  "  anthologies  are,  like  his- 
tories of  literature,  indispensable  to  those  who 
desire  to  find  their  way  about.  Without  such 
works  we  might  never  come  into  contact  with 
those  writers  who  are  most  likely  to  appeal  to 
us.  Were  it  not  for  the  few  examples  of  the 
early  Flemings  in  the  National  Gallery  many  a 
man  might  never  have  gone  to  Belgium  and 
Berlin  to  see  the  Memlings  and  the  van  Eycks, 
the  Matsys  and  the  Patinirs,  the  van  der  Wey- 
dens,  Davids,  and  van  der  Goes.  But  you 
cannot  get  the  fullest  and  the  intensest  pleasure 
out  of  Milton  and  Keats  by  reading  the  ex- 
amples of  them,  however  numerous,  in  the 
[242] 


GALLERIES 

Oxford  Book  of  English  Verse;  still  less  can 
you  fully  know  and  enjoy  Vermeer  or  Man- 
tegna  from  one  or  two  pictures  in  a  National 
Gallery.  It  is  highly  desirable  that  we  should 
have  these  enormous  museums  of  pictures,  in 
order  that  we  may  easily  know  the  best  that  has 
been  done  in  the  world  and  discover,  whether 
we  are  practising  art  or  merely  "  consuming  "  it, 
our  affinities.  But  it  will  be  a  bad  thing  if  all 
the  good  pictures  in  the  world  get  sprinkled 
evenly  throughout  the  world's  great  galleries, 
each  gallery  achieving  its  aim  of  getting  one  or 
two  examples  of  every  good  painter. 

Whenever  I  see  even  a  single  good  picture 
well  hung  in  a  private  house  I  reflect  how  much 
more  pleasure  I  get  out  of  it  there  than  I  should 
have  done  had  I  seen  it  amid  the  conflicting 
clamours  of  a  heterogeneous  public  gallery. 
And  it  is  surely  a  commonplace  of  observa- 
tion that  an  unusual  degree  of  enjoyment  is 
obtained  at  a  gallery  which  is  so  fortunate  as 
to  possess  a  whole  room,  or  a  whole  wall,  of  one 
artist's  works.  How  much  less  effective  would 
the  Giottos  at  Assisi  be  were  they  scattered 
throughout  the  capitals  of  Europe;  how  much 
more  effective  would  the  great  Ghent  altar- 
piece  be  if  it  were  reunited  instead  of  being 
in  pieces  at  Ghent,  Brussels,  and  Berlin.  No 

[243] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

man  can  get  the  most  out  of  Rubens,  Velasquez 
or  Turner  unless  he  has  seen  the  Rubenses  at 
Antwerp  or  Munich,  the  Velasquez  at  the 
Prado,  or  the  Turners  at  the  Tate.  Surely 
the  ideal  would  be  a  dual  system  under  which 
the  great  miscellaneous  collections  were  sup- 
plemented by  small,  public  collections  devoted 
to  particular  artists  or  groups  of  artists.  I  do 
not  know  what  sort  of  public  gallery,  if  any,  is 
owned  by  the  City  of  Norwich.  The  only  time 
I  was  ever  there  I  saw  the  Cathedral  and  then 
found  so  admirable  a  hostelry  that  I  was  not 
tempted  to  explore  further.  But  if  it  has  one 
I  am  sure  it  would  be  much  more  delightful 
and  useful  were  it  entirely  composed  of  the  best 
works  of  old  Crome  and  two  or  three  other 
Norwich  artists,  than  if  it  contained,  like  most 
provincial  galleries,  a  mixture  of  minor  local 
works,  ephemeral  academic  successes  and  du- 
bious old  masters,  landscapes  by  Binks,  poor 
copies  of  Titian  and  Palma  Vecchio,  and 
painted  acres  by  Mr.  Blair  Leighton  or  Mr. 
Sigismund  Goetze.  We  ought  to  diffuse  our 
masterpieces  as  widely  as  possible  without  break- 
ing up  the  groups.  And  I  don't  think  there  is 
any  doubt  that  a  small  town  or  a  country  place 
is  a  better  setting  for  a  one  man  gallery  than 
a  room  or  a  separate  building  in  a  large  city. 

[244] 


GALLERIES 

Three  considerable  collections  exist  of  works 
by  the  late  G.  F.  Watts.  People  differ,  under- 
standably, about  his  eminence;  but  he  will  do  as 
an  illustration.  There  is  the  collection  of  por- 
traits in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery;  there 
is  the  room  full  of  allegories,  including  most  of 
his  major  works  at  the  Tate;  and  there  is  the 
miscellaneous  gallery,  filled  mostly  with  small 
things,  at  his  home  near  Guildford.  For  my- 
self I  remember  that  when  I  visited  the  last, 
one  small  room  in  a  village  with  trees  all 
around  and  a  haycart  in  the  road,  I  got  more 
pleasure  out  of  it  than  I  have  ever  got  out  of 
the  others,  which  are  surrounded  with  crowds 
of  other  pictures,  and  have  to  be  approached 
first  through  London  streets  and  then  through 
turnstiles  laden  with  catalogues  and  guarded 
by  braided  commissionaires.  I  remember  think- 
ing that  had  I  my  way  I  would  shift  half  the 
Tate  Wattses  to  Compton  to  join  the  others. 
Suppose  that  the  cream  of  Constable  were  es- 
tablished similarly  at  Flatford  on  the  Stour,  in 
a  little  white  building  by  the  mill,  where  his  own 
river  runs  through  his  own  valley.  Suffolk 
would  have  an  added  attraction;  Constable 
would  be  seen  to  better  advantage  than  he 
ever  has  been;  and  a  pilgrimage  to  Flatford 
would  be  as  exciting  as  a  visit  to  Haarlem, 

[245] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

where,  in  a  very  small  and  otherwise  not  notable 
collection,  one  finds  the  great  series  of  Halses, 
painted  in  and  for  his  own  town,  and  still  there 
to  his  and  the  town's  glory.  Provincial  towns 
beginning  collections,  and  philanthropists  mak- 
ing collections  which  they  intend  to  leave  to 
the  public,  would  do  well  to  bear  this  in  mind. 
They  should  specialise;  and  where  there  is  a 
local  product  worth  it,  they  should  specialise 
in  that. 


[246] 


INITIALS 

WHENEVER  a  journalist  wants  to  write  some- 
thing, and  lacks  a  peg,  he  invents  a  corre- 
spondent who  (he  states)  "writes  to"  ask, 
point  out,  confirm,  contradict,  qualify,  com- 
plain about,  suggest,  or  urge  something  or  other. 
I  have  done  it  myself.  On  this  occasion,  how- 
ever, the  correspondent  is  a  real  one.  He  is  real, 
and  I  have  very  great  respect  for  him,  although  I 
have  never  seen  him.  And  although  the  question 
he  asks,  the  fact  he  points  out,  the  practice  he 
complains  about,  and  the  changes  he  suggests  or 
urges,  have  in  the  first  instance  a  purely  per- 
sonal relation  to  myself,  I  feel  justified  in  men- 
tioning it  because  it  opens  up  larger  issues. 

The  correspondent  says,  in  his  mild  and 
diffident  way,  "  Why  the  hell  do  you  sign  your 
articles  with  initials?"  Initials,  he  argues,  do 
not  "get  over  the  footlights";  they  do  not 
suggest  a  personality;  they  are  not  remember- 
able.  "  Surely  your  initials  stand  for  some- 
thing. They  did  not  christen  you  with  initials. 
What  does  this  *  J  '  represent? "  A  part  of 
this  contention  I  will  admit  frankly  and  without 

[247] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

hesitation.  The  custom  of  christening  people 
with  initials — although,  I  believe,  long  prevalent 
in  the  United  States,  where  X,  Q,  P,  and  Z 
commonly  do  duty  for  a  second  name — has 
never  caught  hold  in  this  country.  "  J  "  does 
stand  for  something.  What  is  it? 

Well,  it  may  be  Jabez.  It  may  be  Joseph, 
James,  Jonah,  Jeremiah,  Josiah,  Jehu,  Jero- 
boam, Jedediah,  Jasper,  Joshua,  Jenkin,  Joab, 
Jehoianim,  Jehoahash,  Jehosophat,  or  Jerub- 
babel.  If  it  were  Jerubbabel,  I  cannot  deny 
that  "  Jerubbabel  C.  Squire  "  would  "  get  over 
the  footlights."  It  would  be  remembered  by 
every  man  who  had  seen  it,  even  casually  on 
a  bookstall,  for  one  second;  it  might  even  hoist 
me  into  universal  fame.  On  the  other  hand, 
if  it  were  Jerubbabel,  my  motives  for  sup- 
pressing it  would  be  obvious,  and  even  universal 
fame  and  an  enormous  fortune  may  be  pur- 
chased too  dearly.  But  before  we  investigate 
its  actual  nature  further,  let  us  examine  more 
closely  this  gentleman's  general  contentions. 

That  you  do  get  used  to  a  name  is  certainly 
true,  and  the  familiar  name  is  as  much  part  of 
an  author's  "  publicity  outfit "  as  is  the  trade 
name  of  a  brand  of  sardines  or  stove-polish. 
A  new  play  by  Geo.  B.  Shaw  would  take  some 
time  righting  its  way  unless  there  were  elaborate 

[248] 


INITIALS 

explanations  (which  there  certainly  would  be  if 
the  change  were  made)  by  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw 
that  this  was  his  new  style  of  address.  "  G. 
Keith  Chesterton "  might  stand  a  chance ;  the 
author's  surname  is  long  and  uncommon.  But 
H.  George  Wells  or  Herbert  G.  Wells  would 
be  asking  for  neglect,  and  the  name  of  Sir 
Thos.  Caine  on  a  new  novel  would  be  greeted 
by  the  public  with  stares  of  apathetic  non- 
comprehension.  But  let  it  be  observed  that 
there  is  almost  every  sort  of  variety  in  the 
signatures  by  which  these  eminent  men  have 
already  become  known.  Mr.  Shaw  customarily 
writes  both  his  Christian  names  in  full,  or 
begins  with  an  initial  and  writes  the  second 
name  at  length.  Sir  Hall  Caine  suppresses  his 
first  name  and  displays  his  second.  And  the 
other  two  confine  themselves  to  initials.  Yet 
I  do  not  think  it  can  fairly  be  said  that  Mr. 
Chesterton  is  obscure  behind  the  "  G.  K."  or 
that  Mr.  Wells  has  hid  his  light  under  bushels 
of  "H.  Gs." 

I  think  the  truth  of  it  is  that  initials  stick 
just  as  well  as  names,  but  they  take  longer  to 
stick.  They  take  longer  to  stick  because  they 
have  no  intrinsic  interest.  They  have  no 
flavour.  There  are  exceptions.  Mr.  Chester- 
ton has  turned  the  series  "  G.  K.  C."  into  a 

[249] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

kind  of  word,  with  a  tone  of  its  own  like  any 
other  word;  and  if  an  author  arose  who  signed 
his  name  "  G.  K.  Chatterton "  or  "  G.  K. 
Chipps,"  we  should  have  prepossessions  about 
him,  expect  certain  things  from  him,  and  re- 
tain a  memory  of  him  if  only  with  the  result  of 
confusing  him  with  his  initial-sake.  Again, 
there  are  series  of  initials  which  have  a  wholly 
accidental  individuality  which  makes  them  fix 
themselves  at  once.  If  a  man's  initials  are 
"  P.  I.  G."  or  "  F.  O.  O.  L."  we  neither  forget 
it  nor  allow  him  to  forget  it;  if  the  name  at 
the  head  of  this  article  were  "A.  S.  Squire,"  I 
think  it  would  get  over  the  footlights  all  right. 
Its  bray  would  be  ringing  in  the  reader's  ears 
long  after  he  had  laid  down  the  paper.  But 
leaving  exceptional  cases  out  of  account, 
initials,  becoming  pseudo-words  by  familiarity, 
differ  among  themselves  in  value  and  beauty 
just  as  words  do.  A  mass  of  associations  cling 
around  them,  and  they  have  sound-sequences 
which  affect  us  (we  unconscious)  just  as  the 
vowels  and  consonants  in  ordinary  words  do. 
Without  knowing  it,  we  probably  dislike  inno- 
cent initials  which  have  been  borne  by  people 
whom  we  have  detested;  without  knowing  it, 
we  are  enchanted  with  certain  initials  because 
they  come  trailing  clouds  of  glory  from  the 
[250] 


INITIALS 

past  or  because  they  have  a  pleasant  rippling 
sound.  Here  we  get  on  to  the  influence  of 
sounds.  It  is  a  difficult  matter.  All  we  can 
say  is  that  other  things  being  equal  some  words 
are  more  beautiful  than  others:  all  writers  know 
this.  But  it  is  equally  true  that  sound  will  not 
go  all  the  way:  that  good  associations  may 
make  ugly  syllables  seem  beautiful  and  bad 
ones  may  make  beautiful  open  vowels  sound 
ugly.  It  is  hard  to  detach  the  word  from  the 
object.  We  have  only  to  look  at  the  word 
"  Keats  "  to  realise  how  horrible  we  should  think 
it  had  Keats  been  a  vulgar  writer;  and  even  the 
word  "  moon "  would  seem  ugly  if  it  con- 
noted something  red  and  writhing  in  the  entrails 
of  a  fish.  You  may  test  the  truth  of  this  by 
experimenting  with  a  word  which  can  be  used 
in  two  very  different  senses.  Such  a  word  is 
"  lights."  To  my  ear  it  is  not  a  pleasant- 
sounding  word,  merely  as  a  word.  But  it  can 
seem  one  thing  and  the  other.  Think  of  it  in 
connection  with  all  the  beautiful  lights  in  the 
world — the  stars,  candles  in  a  great  old  cham- 
ber, the  lights  of  a  city  seen  from  a  great 
distance,  the  lights  of  cottages  in  a  forest,  or 
of  dawn  over  the  sea — and  it  seems  a  beautiful, 
soft,  lingering  word  fit  to  be  rhymed  (as  it 
always  is)  with  "  nights."  Think  of  it  as  the 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

name  of  those  vague  atrocities  which  are 
hawked  in  mean  streets  as  "  catsmeat,"  and  it 
becomes  a  vile  spluttering  word  fit  only  for  that 
base  use.  But  I  wander. 

So  let  us  return  whence  we  started.  There 
was  one  name  that  I  omitted  from  that  engag- 
ing list  of  designations  beginning  "  J."  There 
are  no  doubt  others;  but  I  haven't  my  old 
Testament  with  me.  The  name  I  refer  to  is 
John.  It  has  been  borne  by  many  illustrious 
men  and  an  innumerable  multitude  of  the  ob- 
scure. It  was  made  glorious  by  John  Milton, 
John  Keats,  John  Donne,  John  Ford;  and  at 
various  times  it  has  renewed  its  lustre  in  John 
Ketch,  King  John,  twenty-two  Pope  Johns, 
John  Galsworthy,  John  Masefield,  John  Peel, 
John  Corlett,  John  Smith,  John  Jones,  John 
Robinson,  and  John  Barleycorn.  There  was 
also  Friar  John,  Brother  John  of  the  Funnels, 
doughtiest,  thirstiest,  and,  very  likely,  most 
learned  of  all.  There  is  no  name  like  it. 
Fashions  in  other  names  come  and  go.  Thomas 
and  William  slump  and  boom.  Geralds,  Lu- 
cians,  Marmadukes,  Susans,  Peggys,  Margarets, 
Marjories,  are  the  rage  of  a  generation,  and 
then  become  sickening  to  the  palate.  A  countess 
digs  up  the  name  Gladys  for  her  daughter; 
in  ten  years  it  covers  the  country;  in  another 
[252] 


INITIALS 

fifty  it  sinks  into  disrepute;  and  then  it  goes 
on  flourishing  in  dark  byways  until  some  new 
explorer  produces  it  once  more  as  a  fresh  and 
radiant  thing.  But  John  goes  on.  From  the 
ages  when  it  was  spelt  Jehan  to  the  present 
day  the  proportion  of  Johns  to  the  total  popu- 
lation has  probably  never  fluctuated  beyond  one 
or  two  per  cent.  It  is  as  fixed  as  the  English 
landscape  and  the  procession  of  the  seasons. 
And,  like  sun,  moon,  and  stars,  roses  and  oaks, 
the  yearly  renewing  miracle  of  the  woods  and 
the  cornfields,  it  never  becomes  wearisome  or 
tarnished.  Time  does  not  make  stale  its  infinite 
sameness;  the  most  fickle  slaves  in  Fashion's 
retinue  cannot  contract  a  positive  distaste  for 
it;  in  its  dignity,  solidity,  greenness  and  grave 
mystery,  it  defies  the  weakness  of  those  who 
tire  of  all  things.  Nothing  affects  it;  nothing 
can  bring  it  into  contempt;  it  stands  like  a 
rock  amid  the  turbulent  waves  of  human  his- 
tory, as  fine  and  noble  a  thing  now  as  it  was 
when  it  first  took  shape  on  human  lips.  It  is 
a  name  to  live  up  to;  but  if  one  who  bears  it 
sinks  into  disrepute  it  falls  not  with  him,  but 
rather  stays  in  the  firmament  above  him,  shin- 
ing down  upon  him  like  a  reproachful  star. 

But  I  do  not  see  why  I  should  say  what  my 
own  name  is  if  I  don't  want  to. 

[253] 


RECITATION  IN  PUBLIC 

THE  other  day  there  was  given  in  London  a 
public  recitation  of  poetry.  Eleven  authors 
delivered  passages  from  their  own  works  to  an 
audience  of  a  hundred  and  fifty  ladies  who  paid 
two  guineas  each,  the  money  going  to  a  charity. 
Perhaps  I  had  better  say  nothing  about  the  per- 
formance. Only  this:  That  one  of  those  gal- 
lantly endeavouring  to  get  his  verses  off  without 
referring  to  his  book,  got  tied  up  towards  the 
end.  He  left  lines  out,  put  lines  in,  got  lines 
in  the  wrong  order,  and,  being  resolved  not  to 
break  down,  shamelessly  vamped  and  gagged. 
Apparently  the  candour  of  his  demeanour  was 
such  that  nobody  noticed. 

It  is  highly  probable  that  these  recitations 
will  become  a  permanent  institution,  analogous 
to  Chamber  Concerts.  The  prevailing  notion 
is  that  there  is  something  ridiculous  about 
standing  up  in  public  and  reciting  poetry.  But 
all  human  actions  are  ridiculous,  properly  re- 
garded; and  this  one  is  certainly  no  more 
ridiculous  than  acting  or  playing  the  flute  in 
[254] 


RECITATION  IN  PUBLIC 

public.  Flute-players,  in  fact,  are  most  ridicu- 
lous. It  is  quite  evident  that  verse  ought  to 
be  spoken  aloud.  If  a  man  takes  pains  to 
make  his  work  musical,  it  is  more  than  ridicu- 
lous that  it  should  never  be  heard  save  by  the 
"  inward  ear."  In  earlier  ages  nobody  ques- 
tioned this.  When,  as  Mr.  Kipling  elegantly 
puts  it:  "  'Omer  smote  'is  bloomin'  lyre,"  his 
lyre  was  merely  the  background  of  his  declama- 
tion, and  the  finest  early  English  poetry  has 
reached  us  by  oral  transmission.  When  min- 
strels turned  into  authors  recitation  died — or, 
rather,  was  left  to  the  unintelligent.  In  this 
country,  until  recently,  the  general  craving  to 
hear  verse  well  spoken  has  been  ministered  to 
only  by  imbeciles,  who,  at  bazaars  and  smoking 
concerts,  make  audiences  shuffle  uneasily  in 
their  seats  while  they  roar  Out  with  the  Life- 
boat, Kissing  Cup's  Race,  or  Tennyson's 
The  Revenge.  Millions  at  functions  in  aid  of 
the  choir  outing  or  at  annual  concerts  of  local 
literary  societies  must  have  heard  this  last,  and 
felt  their  flesh  creep  as  the  orator  leant  forward 
and  daintily  fluttered  his  fingers  when  he  came 
to  "  a  pinnace  like  a  fluttered  bird  came  flying 
from  far  away."  The  poets  themselves  have 
abstained  from  public  appearances.  But  their 
knowledge  that  recitation  was  better  than  silent 

[255] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

reading  has  usually  led  them  to  read  aloud  in 
private.  Tennyson,  "  rolling  out  his  hollow  oes 
and  aes,"  was  heard  by  many,  and  Swinburne, 
as  we  now  learn,  would  oblige  if  asked,  and 
chant  his  compositions  in  a  shrill  voice  which,  at 
exciting  points,  rose  into  a  scream.  If,  how- 
ever, good  verse  gains  by  being  read  aloud,  it 
is  obviously  illogical  to  restrict  such  perform- 
ances to  private  houses:  and  in  the  last  few 
years  the  recognition  of  this  fact  has  spread. 
The  revival  is  mainly  due  to  Mr.  Yeats,  who 
thought  out  and  perfected  a  technique  of  recita- 
tion and  began  giving  readings  from  his  own 
poems.  To  his  inspiration  was  probably  due 
the  action  of  the  proprietors  of  the  Poetry 
Bookshop  in  Devonshire  Street,  who  have  for 
some  years  given  recitals  at  regular  and  fre- 
quent intervals,  amongst  those  who  have  ap- 
peared being  Mr.  Yeats,  Mr.  Hewlett,  Mr. 
Masefield,  Mr.  Sturge  Moore,  and  Rupert 
Brooke.  The  Americans,  who  have  a  passion 
for  lectures  of  all  sorts,  have  taken  to  arrang- 
ing tours  of  English  poets ;  two  or  three  of  them 
are  there  now,  reading  to  immense  audiences  at, 
I  hope,  great  profit  to  themselves.  The  prac- 
tice is  going  to  grow.  And  for  two  reasons. 
One  is  that  good  recitation  is  artistically  inter- 
esting: the  other  is  that  there  will  be  money  in  it. 


RECITATION  IN  PUBLIC 

Now  there  is,  unhappily,  no  reason  to  sup- 
pose that  because  a  man  can  write  a  musical 
thing,  he  will  necessarily  be  a  good  reader.  For 
instance,  he  might  be  dumb.  Failing  that  quite 
disabling  infirmity,  he  may  have  a  bad  voice, 
he  may  have  an  imperfect  control  over  his  voice, 
he  may  have  a  physical  appearance  so  unim- 
pressive that  no  amount  of  emotional  force  can 
counterbalance  it,  or  he  may  be  so  reserved  that 
he  is  quite  unable  to  display  his  intimate  feel- 
ings in  public.  It  is  one  thing  to  wear  your 
heart  on  your  sleeve  in  print:  and  quite  another 
to  stand  face  to  face  with  an  audience  and 
expose  your  tenderest  emotions  and  noblest 
aspirations.  If  an  author  himself  has  the  neces- 
sary histrionic  gifts,  voice,  and  audacity,  he  is 
the  best  person  to  hear,  as  he  should  know 
better  than  anyone  else  exactly  the  flow  and 
stress  of  his  language.  But  the  important  thing 
is  not  that  we  should  hear  the  words  spoken  by 
the  person  who  wrote  them  (if  it  were,  recita- 
tions from  dead  poets  would  be  impossible),  but 
that  they  should  be  spoken  by  people  with  suffi- 
cient intelligence  to  understand  them.  Most 
Shakespearean  actors  do  not  understand  Shakes- 
peare's verse,  and  have  no  idea  whatever 
about  rhythm.  They  either  spout  their  lines 
with  the  mechanical  regularity  of  a  metronome, 

[257] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

or  gabble  and  garble  them  with  the  avowed 
object  of  making  them  resemble  prose  as  closely 
as  possible.  What  is  wanted  is  a  reciter  with 
all  a  good  poet's  critical  taste :  one  who,  whether 
or  not  a  practising  artist  himself,  can  give  lan- 
guage and  rhythms  the  values  that  the  composer 
meant  them  to  have. 

My  observations  at  the  recent  performance 
led  to  several  conclusions,  which  may  be  worth 
recording.  One  is  that  there  is  more  in  the 
technique  of  recitation  than  many  good  natural 
readers  might  suppose.  A  man  may  have 
all  the  necessary  attributes  of  voice,  under- 
standing, and  emotional  force;  but  there  is 
room  for  study.  This  is  especially  so  with 
poets.  The  line  about  Tennyson's  "  oes  and 
aes  "  is  significant.  To  a  poet  a  musical  line 
has  a  tendency  to  present  itself  as  a  succession 
of  beautiful  vowel  sounds.  Vowel  sounds,  in 
certain  sequences,  are  beautiful.  Properly 
enunciated,  with  right  tonal  inflexion,  the  syl- 
lables "  la,  la,  la,  la,"  may  be  delivered  so  as 
to  produce  quite  melting  effects.  Why  that  is 
so  may  be  left  to  Students  of  Evolution  to 
determine;  they  will  probably  establish  a  con- 
nexion with  the  love-song  of  the  megatherium 
to  its  mate;  or  the  tuneful  warnings  addressed 
to  the  herd  by  the  chief  bull  bison  when  he 
[>S8] 


RECITATION  IN  PUBLIC 

scented  danger.  At  any  rate,  people  who  read 
musical  verse  aloud  are  apt  to  dwell  so  lovingly 
on  the  vowels  that  they  forget  to  make  the* 
consonants  clear:  the  word  "  bite  "  at  the  end  of 
a  line  sounds  to  the  audience  like  "  bi."  I  think, 
again,  that  the  lighting  of  the  auditorium  wants 
considering.  However  much  in  harmony  the 
souls  of  the  audience  may  be  with  the  reciter, 
what  he  sees  in  a  lighted  room  is  not  their  souls 
but  their  hats :  which  are  distracting.  The  dark- 
ened auditorium  has  its  drawbacks:  it  makes 
one  feel  rather  unnatural;  and  if  it  is  accom- 
panied, as  it  is  at  the  Poetry  Bookshop,  by 
lighted  candles  on  the  platform,  it  produces  so 
ecclesiastical  an  atmosphere  that  the  audience 
dare  not  applaud  or  laugh  without  a  sense  of 
sin  or  at  least  solecism. 

But  the  most  important  thing  is  this:  that  if 
the  Art  of  Recitation  is  to  have  a  fair  chance, 
it  should  be  understood  that  to  get  much  out 
of  a  recital  you  ought — unless  the  subject  mat- 
ter is  very  simple — to  be  fairly  familiar  before- 
hand with  the  works  recited.  The  ordinary 
concert-goer  does  not  expect  to  "  take  in  "  a 
new  symphony  properly  the  first  time  he  hears 
it;  and  he  habitually  gets  most  of  his  pleasure 
out  of  hearing  again  things  that  he  has  heard 
before.  You  do  not  follow  verses  half  so  well 

[259] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

the  first  time  you  hear  them  as  you  do 
the  first  time  you  read  them:  the  ear  cannot 
take  the  sort  of  instantaneous  survey  that  the 
eye  takes.  The  simplest  poem,  if  unfamiliar, 
sounds  obscure  when  read  aloud.  Finally,  it 
is,  I  think,  evident  that  a  programme  with  sev- 
eral names  on  it  is  better  than  a  programme 
filled  by  a  single  executant.  One  man's  voice — 
in  a  public  as  in  a  private  room — if  heard  for 
two  consecutive  hours,  almost  inevitably  re- 
duces one  to  a  condition  of  mental  coma  if  it 
does  not  actually  send  one  to  sleep. 

These  remarks  are,  I  know,  fragmentary. 
But  nobody  who  has  heard  good  recitation 
could  fail  to  appreciate  the  unexploited  possi- 
bilities of  the  craft.  And  if  it  develops  it  will 
have  the  incidental  advantage  of  supplying 
poets  with  incomes.  Homer  sang  probably  in 
the  open  air,  and  got  nothing  but  his  keep.  But 
two-guinea  seats,  or  even  five-shilling  ones, 
mean  something;  and  even  if  the  authors  do 
not  themselves  recite  and  do  not  even  get  a 
percentage  on  proceeds,  there  never  was  so 
effective  a  form  of  advertisement  of  their  books. 
The  greatest  trouble  with  good  modern  litera- 
ture has  been  to  make  people  who  would  like  it 
aware  of  its  existence. 

[260] 


HUMANE  EDUCATION 

IT  is  evident  that  we  are  in  for  a  prolonged 
struggle  about  education.  Everybody  is 
agreed — except  the  dwindling  minority  who 
have  a  sentimental  preference  for  illiterate  and 
deferential  simpletons — that  the  quality  and 
quantity  of  our  education  must  be  improved 
after  the  war.  But  there  is  a  violent  divergence 
of  opinion  as  to  what  "  improvement "  is,  what 
sort  of  things  we  are  increasingly  to  teach. 
Strong  sections  of  industrials  who  still  imagine 
that  men  can  be  mere  machines  and  are  at  their 
best  as  machines  if  they  are  mere  machines  are 
already  menacing  what  they  call  "  useless  "  edu- 
cation. They  deride  the  classics,  and  they  are 
mildly  contemptuous  of  history,  philosophy,  and 
English.  They  want  our  educational  institu- 
tions, from  the  oldest  University  to  the  young- 
est elementary  school,  to  concentrate  on  busi- 
ness or  the  things  that  are  patently  useful  in 
business.  Technical  instruction  is  to  be  pro- 
vided for  adolescent  artisans;  bookkeeping  and 
shorthand  for  prospective  clerks;  and  the 

[261] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

cleverest  we  are  to  set  to  "  business  methods," 
to  modern  languages  (which  can  be  used  in  cor- 
respondence with  foreign  firms),  and  to  science 
(which  can  be  applied  to  industry).  French 
and  German  are  the  languages,  not  of  Mon- 
taigne and  Goethe,  but  of  Schmidt  Brothers, 
of  Elberfeld,  and  Dupont  et  Cie.,  of  Lyons. 
Chemistry  and  physics  are  not  explorations  into 
the  physical  constitution  of  the  universe,  but 
sources  of  new  dyes,  new  electric  light  fila- 
ments, new  means  of  making  things  which 
can  be  sold  cheap  and  fast  to  the  Nigerian 
and  the  Chinese.  For  Latin  there  is  a 
limited  field  so  long  as  the  druggists  in- 
sist on  retaining  it  in  their  prescriptions. 
Greek  has  no  apparent  use  at  all,  unless  it  be 
as  a  source  of  syllables  for  hybrid  names  of 
patent  medicines  and  metal  polishes.  The  soul 
of  man,  the  spiritual  basis  of  civilsation — what 
gibberish  is  that? 

It  is  against  blind  and  ruinous  bigotry  of 
that  kind  that  Professor  Gilbert  Murray  has 
written  his  Religio  Grammatici  (Allen  & 
Unwin).  Professor  Murray  is  a  Professor  of 
Greek.  He  has  spent  most  of  his  life  studying 
Greek,  and  is  openly  unrepentant.  Lest  it  be 
supposed  that  he  is  merely — a  thing  frequently 
suggested  of  those  who  support  the  ancient 
[262] 


HUMANE  EDUCATION 

tongues — defending  his  own  vested  interests,  it 
may  be  added  that  were  Greek  forbidden  by  a 
Defence  of  the  Realm  Act  regulation  produced 
by  some  Business  Government  of  the  future, 
he  would  be  equally  competent  as  a  Professor 
of  English.  At  all  events,  his  present  plea  is 
not  a  plea  for  Greek  and  Latin  exclusively. 
He  argues,  with  reason,  that  we  are  mainly 
what  we  are  and  know  most  of  what  we  know 
because  the  Greeks  and  Latins,  pagan  and 
Christian,  lived  before  us.  With  them  we  find 
the  origins  of  our  religious  and  political  insti- 
tutions, of  our  literature,  to  a  great  extent  of 
our  language,  of  our  mathematics,  mechanics, 
law,  and  morals.  Whatever  the  percentage  of 
Jute  and  Angle  blood  in  us,  we  are  not  the 
children  of  the  Jutes.  The  Germans  them- 
selves, who  have  far  more  Teutonic  blood  in 
them,  do  not  draw  from  Teutonic  sources  such 
things  as  they  have  in  common  with  civilised 
Europe,  and  when  the  ex-Kaiser  exhorted  the 
youths  of  Germany  to  be  "  little  Germans,  not 
little  Greeks  and  Romans,"  he  was  asking  them 
to  cut  away  the  ground  they  stand  on.  In 
Aristophanes  and  Horace  we  find  (with  local 
differences)  ourselves;  in  Beowulf  we  find  some- 
thing remote  and  savage,  much  more  alien  from 
ourselves,  thinking  and  feeling  in  strange  cate- 

[263] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

gories,  and  talking  in  language  most  remarkably 
strange. 

Professor  Murray,  however,  in  urging  the 
retention  of  the  classics  as  an  element  in  educa- 
tion, does  not  make  the  mistake  (made  often 
by  their  supporters  and  always  by  their  oppo- 
nents) of  treating  them  as  a  separate  and 
peculiar  thing.  He  regards  them  as  part — 
though  a  very  large  part — of  our  past,  as  Euro- 
peans, and  of  the  past  of  the  human  race  as  a 
whole.  As  such,  they  have — and  the  advan- 
tages they  offer  are  shared,  in  varying  degree, 
by  all  literary  and  historical  studies — great  ad- 
vantages to  offer.  They  offer  to  the  individual 
what  is  at  lowest  a  continual  source  of  enjoy- 
ment and  entertainment,  and  at  highest  much 
more.  Professor  Murray  says  that  pure  sci- 
ence offers  "  an  escape  from  the  world  about 
him,  an  escape  from  the  noisy  present  into  a 
region  of  facts  which  are  as  they  are,  and  not 
as  foolish  human  beings  want  them  to  be;  an 
escape  from  the  commonness  of  daily  happen- 
ings into  the  remote  world  of  high  and  severely 
trained  imagination;  an  escape  from  mortality 
in  the  service  of  a  growing  and  durable  pur- 
pose, the  progressive  discovery  of  "  truth." 
That  is  the  literary  man's  tribute  to  a 
mode  of  intellectual  discovery  which  is  not 

[264] 


HUMANE  EDUCATION 

his;    of    the    mode    which    is    his    he   speaks 

thus: 

-» 

*  The  Philistine,'  the  vulgarian,  the  Great 
Sophist,  the  passer  of  base  coin  for  true,  he 
is  all  about  us  and,  worse,  he  has  his  outposts 
inside  us,  persecuting  our  peace,  spoiling  our 
sight,  confusing  our  values,  making  a  man's 
self  seem  greater  than  the  race  and  the  present 
thing  more  important  than  the  eternal.  From 
him  and  his  influence  we  find  our  escape  by 
means  of  the  Grammata  into  that  calm  world 
of  theirs,  where  stridency  and  clamour  are  for- 
gotten in  the  ancient  stillness,  where  the  strong 
iron  is  long  since  rusted  and  the  rocks  of  granite 
broken  into  dust,  but  the  great  things  of  the 
human  spirit  still  shine  like  stars  pointing 
Man's  way  onward  to  the  great  triumph  or  the 
great  tragedy,  and  even  the  little  things,  the 
beloved  and  tender  and  funny  and  familiar 
things,  beckon  across  gulfs  of  death  and  change 
with  a  magic  poignancy,  the  old  things  that  our 
dead  leaders  and  forefathers  loved,  viva  adhuc 
et  desiderio  pulcriora  (Living  still  and  more 
beautiful  because  of  our  longing)." 

But  let  us  be  more  "  practical."     Literary 
records  being  in  the  main  the  records  of  con- 

[265] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

spicuous  men  and  conspicuous  races,  their  study 
offers  the  spiritual  and  intellectual  examples 
which  are  a  perpetual  source  of  new  effort. 
The  virtues,  without  which  great  new  enterprise 
(even  commercial  enterprise)  cannot  be  carried 
through,  are  not  so  common  all  round  us  that 
we  can  spare  the  contemplation  of  the  great 
achievements  of  the  dead.  As  Professor  Mur- 
ray suggests,  progress  in  historical  times  has 
consisted,  as  far  as  we  can  tell,  in  the  accumula- 
tion of  knowledge  and  material  objects;  we 
cannot  afford  to  neglect  Pericles  and  St. 
Francis  merely  because  they  never  used  a  tele- 
phone. Sir  Philip  Sidney — scarcely  the  type 
of  the  spectacled  and  ineffective  recluse — said 
that  he  never  heard  the  old  Ballad  of  Chevy 
Chase,  but  his  heart  was  stirred  as  it  were  by  a 
trumpet.  Take  the  humblest  examples:  Bruce 
and  the  Spider,  which  has  been  set  before  scores 
of  millions  of  British  children.  It  had  its  uses, 
though  it  taught  the  "  pedestrian  virtue  of 
pertinacity."  It  may  be  that  the  Great  Film, 
or  the  Man  who  Saved  the  Empire,  will  be 
deemed  in  the  future  adequate  substitute  for 
that  anecdote;  but  even  that  is  historical  edu- 
cation, literary  education,  education  which 
(whatever  utility  it  may  have  to  others)  can- 
not be  supposed  to  increase  the  ability  of  those^ 
[266] 


HUMANE  EDUCATION 

who  see  it  to  earn  their  own  living  save  in  so 
far  as  it  gives  them  not  technical,  but  moral, 
assistance.  And,  finally,  if  you  are  to  think 
about  the  future,  your  "  conjectures  will  not  be 
much  good  unless  you  have  in  some  way 
studied  other  places  and  other  ages."  All  liter- 
ature is,  in  a  sense,  social  science;  we  learn  from 
it  what  men  are,  what  can  be  done  with  them, 
where  they  have  failed,  where  and  under  what 
conditions  they  have  succeeded. 

All  this  is  trite,  and  has  been  said  (though 
not  so  well  as  by  Professor  Murray)  ten  thou- 
sand times.  Nevertheless,  in  Mr.  Chesterton's 
old  image,  the  wall  will  go  black  if  you  don't 
keep  on  whitewashing  it.  The  world  at  this 
moment  contains  a  great  many  people  who 
think — or,  rather,  think  they  think,  or,  rather, 
talk  as  if  they  thought  they  thought — that  man 
exists  for  the  two  only  purposes  of  producing 
goods,  and  more  men  to  eat  and  wear  them; 
and  who  talk  also  as  though  our  little  life 
were  not  rounded  by  a  sleep,  with  something 
beyond  it.  They  will  be  on  the  ramp  when  the 
world  settles  down;  the  dons  (who  feel  very 
solitary  and  timid  and  unsupported)  may  not 
realise  how  much  backing  they  can  command  if 
they  only  begin  to  fight;  and  some  supporters 
of  the  humanities  ridiculously  and  disastrously 

[267] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

argue  as  if  Greek  and  Latin  were  the  only  in- 
dispensables  and  the  endowment  of  scientific 
research  somehow  incompatible  with  them. 
They  would  be  better  advised  to  yield  a  little  as 
to  compulsory  classics,  and  to  endeavour  to 
secure  that  if  Greek  and  Latin  be  not  com- 
pulsorily  studied,  then  the  literature  and  history 
of  England  should  be.  We  should  never  have 
had  half  the  uproar  about  the  classics  if  their 
more  pedantic  and  conventional  champions  had 
not  systematically  ignored  the  claims  of  Eng- 
lish, which  is,  after  all,  even  more  important  for 
us  than  Latin  and  Greek.  It  is  a  good  thing 
to  know  Homer,  but  it  is  preposterous  for  an 
Englishman  to  know  Homer  and  never  to  have 
opened  Chaucer.  If  the  humanities  are  to  be 
saved,  the  ground  of  defence  will  have  to  be 
shifted  a  little. 


[268] 


A  SUBJECT 

GOING  into  the  country  for  a  week-end  (with- 
out the  least  intention  of  beginning  this  page 
bestially  with  a  participle),  I  found  that  I  had 
left  at  home  the  book  which  I  had  intended  to 
review.  Had  it  been  a  book  of  argument,  that 
need  not  have  been  much  of  a  difficulty;  for  I 
could  have  mentioned  the  book's  name  and  then 
argued  with  and  about  everybody  else  who  had 
ever  dealt  with  the  matter  under  consideration. 
But  it  was  a  collection  of  letters,  and  you  can- 
not review  a  collection  of  letters  without  quot- 
ing from  them,  or,  at  least,  reading  them:  that 
is,  unless  you  are  cleverer  than  I  am  or  more 
impudent  than  I  dare  to  be.  The  result  was 
that  I  found  myself  with  "  nothing  to  write 
about." 

The  situation  must  be  a  familiar  one  to  every 
routine  writer;  and  I  conceive  that  all  men  meet 
it  in  the  same  way.  They  wish  that  they  had 
gone  to  the  Straits  Settlements  to  plant  rubber 
at  Kuala  Lumpur  or  some  such  place;  or  that 
they  had  become  doctors  or  professional  sol- 

[269] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

diers;  or  that  they  had  gone  into  the  Civil 
Service,  or  that  they  had  jumped  at  that  open- 
ing on  the  Stock  Exchange.  They  madden 
those  around  them  with  their  querulous  com- 
plaints, beneath  which  there  seems  to  be  an 
implication  that  it  is  a  monstrous  injustice  that 
a  subject  has  not  been  provided  by  family, 
or  friends,  or  rained  down  from  heaven  by 
Providence.  They  sit  down,  get  up,  walk 
about,  pull  their  hair,  pick  up  papers  and  look 
at  them,  open  books  and  begin  to  read,  though 
they  know  time  presses,  smoke  pipes  and  ciga- 
rettes alternately,  spill  ashes,  talk  jerkily  to 
dogs  and  cats,  wish  they  were  rich,  write  head- 
lines in  a  fair,  round  hand,  draw  faces,  and  put 
down  words  like  "The,"  "Everybody"  (and 
"Going"),  in  the  hope  that  they  will  start 
trains  of  thought — or,  at  any  rate,  trains  of 
words,  which  are  the  next  best  thing.  The 
clock  ticks  on  as  remorselessly  as  it  did  to 
Faustus;  the  time  of  train  or  post  approaches; 
the  game  seems  up;  suicide  presents  itself  as  a 
remedy  for  life's  ills;  reason  interposes  that 
the  worst  troubles  can  be  survived;  and  in  the 
end  something  happens.  As  a  fact,  no  editor 
ever  gets  letters  from  regular  essayists  saying, 
"  Excuse  me  this  week,  I  have  no  ideas."  The 
[270] 


A  SUBJECT 

pressure  of  necessity  forces  the  door  and  some- 
thing rushes  in. 

So  it  was  with  what  I  was  long  ago  warned 
not  to  call  "  oneself."  I  had  told  myself 
twenty  times  that  I  had  nothing  to  write  about; 
I  had  ransacked  my  memory  in  vain  for  frag- 
ments of  some  recent  intelligent  conversation 
which  might  have  raised  some  literary  problem 
of  interest;  I  had  searched  several  papers  and 
many  shelves  for  something  which  might  appeal- 
capable  of  exposition  or  dispute;  I  had  finally 
sat  down  in  a  sulk;  and  then  an  Inner  Voice  re- 
peated "  nothing  to  write  about "  in  tones  of 
contempt.  Justly;  for  what  nonsense  it  was! 
To  begin  with,  there  is  "  Nothing  "  itself,  a  sub- 
ject which  has  not  been  exhausted,  though  it 
has  been  glorified  by  a  dead  poet  and  a  living 
essayist.  And,  apart  from  nothing,  there  is  any- 
thing and  everything  else,  including  (as  was 
long  ago  observed)  a  broomstick.  A  change 
came  over  my  brain,  and  I  felt  suddenly  as 
though  I  could  write,  with  equal  fecundity,  on 
anything  in  the  world.  My  mind,  my  body,  the 
room,  the  landscape,  the  sky,  the  universe  instan- 
taneously became  crowded  with  subjects  all 
clamouring  to  be  investigated. 

That  is  what  is  known  as  the  awakening  of 
the  imagination,  a  process  that  may  take  place 

[271] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

in  all  sorts  of  ways :  that  may  be  brought  about 
by  a  word,  a  sound,  a  scent,  a  drink.  The  world, 
that  seemed  a  collection  of  lifeless  matter,  is 
suddenly  invested  with  wonder ;  all  things  spring 
to  life  and  are  clothed  with  infinite  associations; 
every  object  recovers  its  history  and  its  mystery 
— which  is  history  undisclosed.  Every  shape 
and  colour  acquires  interest,  every  aspect  of 
every  object  asks  questions.  Here,  at  this  mo- 
ment, I  look  at  my  hand,  my  moving  hand.  I 
see  it  as  the  slave  of  will,  the  prodigious  gar- 
ment of  soul ;  as  a  concourse  of  chemicals  drawn 
together  by  unimaginable  forces;  as  the  heir  of 
innumerable  ancestors,  paws  and  claws  and  ten- 
drils. I  pore  over  the  elevations  and  depres- 
sions, the  nails  and  the  little  hairs,  the  pits 
whence  the  little  hairs  grow,  the  ribs  and  wrin- 
kles of  the  skin,  never  the  same  on  any  two  hu- 
man hands.  I  think  of  chiromancy,  and  wonder 
how  began  the  human  belief  that  a  man's  fate 
was  written  on  his  hands;  who  it  was  named 
those  thin,  pink  streaks  and  girdles  by  the  names 
of  Life  and  Venus  and  Mars;  and  why  so  re- 
markable a  doctrine  should  have  started  if  there 
was  no  truth  in  it.  How  interesting  it  would  be 
to  pursue  that  speculation,  to  meditate  on  it  and 
to  examine  the  reflections  of  other  men  on  it, 
of  the  ancients,  of  Paracelsus  perhaps,  of  mod- 
[272] 


A  SUBJECT 

ern  doctors.  The  mind  travels  to  Bertillon  and 
Scotland  Yard;  to  finger-prints  on  windows  and 
woodwork;  to  greasy  and  bloody  finger-prints; 
to  counter-detective  work;  to  gloves.  At  that 
word  gloves,  all  the  gloves  in  the  world  soar 
into  sight:  velvet  gloves,  the  gauntlet  of  the 
King's  champion,  the  glove  that  the  heartless 
French  lady  flung  among  the  lions  for  the 
seigneur  to  pick  up,  gloves  to  which  men  have 
written  songs,  gloves  of  an  ancient  fashion  kept 
in  lavender  with  faded  letters.  And,  returning, 
I  think  of  metaphorical  hands,  of  the  hands  of 
fate  and  the  hands  of  destiny;  of  symbolical 
hands,  of  clouds  no  bigger  than  a  man's  hand, 
of  finger-posts  and  pointers;  of  sculptured 
hands,  the  giant  hand  of  Rodin;  of  real  hands, 
hands  long  dust,  Queen  Mary's,  and  Alexander's 
that  curbed  Bucephalus;  of  Lady  Macbeth's 
little  hand  from  which  no  waters  could  wash  the 
stain,  of  the  white  hands  of  Iseult  of  Brittany, 
and  the  pale  hands  that  the  ghosts  stretched  out 
across  Acheron. 

How  easy  it  would  be  to  write  a  large  book 
about  hands;  how  impossible  to  exhaust  their 
beauties  and  their  strangenesses,  their  diversity 
and  multitude  of  their  works.  But  why  linger 
on  the  hand?  There  is  the  pen  also.  It  is  a 
fountain-pen,  and  has  to  be  dipped  continually 

[273] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

in  an  inkpot ;  but,  though  degenerate  as  an  indi- 
vidual, it  is  the  scion  of  a  wonderful  race.  Its 
very  name  is  history  in  a  crystal,  and  memorises 
the  wing  of  the  goose  with  strong  quills.  Steel 
pens  and  gold  pens,  now  dominant,  are  but 
newcomers;  the  stylus  had  a  longer  and  a  wider 
reign;  there  is  also  the  brush,  which  the  Chinese 
— whose  ink  the  French  call  chinois  and  we 
Indian — prefer;  there  are  also  fingers,  which, 
used  by  prisoners  and  dying  travellers  for  writ- 
ing messages  in  their  own  blood,  have  estab- 
lished a  peculiarly  intimate  link  between  the 
hand  and  the  pen.  Then,  the  characters  of  pens, 
their  racial  peculiarities  and  habits;  the  broad 
pens,  the  fine  pens,  the  new  pen  that  refuses  to 
take  ink,  the  old  one  that  is  encrusted;  the  wil- 
fulness  of  the  pen  that  crosses;  the  mania  of 
pens  for  the  collection  of  hairs ;  the  difficulties  of 
removing  such  hairs;  smudges;  blots;  the  prob- 
lem of  what  size  blot  really  matters,  and  when. 
Here,  in  looking  at  the  operation  of  writing, 
we  come  upon  a  large  area  of  human  life  and 
activity;  yet  who  has  explored  it  and  analysed 
its  content?  One  thinks  into  it  like  a  man  dig- 
ging in  a  cave ;  the  more  one  discovers  the  larger 
the  surface  exposed  to  research. 

I  come  to  the  ink.    How  is  it  made?    I  don't 
know;  if  I  looked  it  up  in  the  encyclopaedia,  I 

[274] 


A  SUBJECT 

should  find  a  whole  article  about  that.  I  fancy 
that  gall  and  lamp-black  come  in.  What  is  gall? 
What  things  have  been  done  with  ink!  How 
much  ink  has  been  shed  by  journalists  in  noble 
causes!  How  pathetic  is  the  yellowness  of  old 
ink !  How  true  is  that  observation  of  the  anony- 
mous Caroline  that  we  should  have  very  little 
to  drink  if  all  the  sea  were  ink.  A  great  vista 
opens  up  from  ink. 

The  pen,  the  ink,  the  table-cloth  (black  and 
white  check) ;  paper;  a  blue  bowl  full  of  odd- 
ments; a  window;  brick  chimneys;  bare  elms;  a 
mottled  sky.  Below,  a  garden  and  plants  in 
winter  sleep;  a  pond  where  fat  goldfish  used  to 
be,  and  probably  still  are,  waving  to  and  fro 
with  gaping  and  closing  mouths,  amid  a  green 
growth,  hiding  under  flat  leaves,  diving  out  of 
sight,  rising  bright  to  the  surface.  Fields,  farms, 
churches,  trains,  towns,  London,  the  sea.  Each 
word  is  the  head  of  a  comet  with  an  infinite  tail 
of  coloured  light.  I  am  humiliated  at  the  vari- 
ety and  splendour  of  things  and  ashamed  of  my 
own  dullness.  Never  again,  I  say,  shall  I  feel 
that  there  is  nothing  to  write  about.  .  .  . 

But  I  shall. 


[275] 


GOAKS  AND  HUMOUR 

THERE  are  a  great  many  books  about  Wit  and 
Humour.  Hobbes  thought  one  laughed  be- 
cause one  felt  superior;  Bergson  thinks  that  the 
comic  is  always  the  animate  imitating  the  me- 
chanical; and  Kant  thought  something  else,  I 
forget  what.  The  last  treatise  I  read  was  by  the 
German  Professor  Freud,  who  appeared  anx- 
ious to  prove  that  wit  and  humour  are  a  kind  of 
sexual  perversions.  But  I  still  do  not  under- 
stand what  they  are,  and  I  have  something 
better  to  do  than  make  my  head  ache  by  at- 
tempting to  invent  satisfactory,  or  even  unsat- 
isfactory, definitions  of  them.  If  it  is  difficult 
to  define  wit  and  humour,  it  is  equally  difficult 
to  discriminate  precisely  between  the  humour 
of  one  nation  and  the  humour  of  another.  There 
certainly  are  differences.  But  probably  there 
is  no  special  form  of  joke  that  can  be  appre- 
ciated by  every  American,  and  by  no  English- 
man, or  vice-versa.  And  there  is  a  great  deal 
of  American  humorous  writing  which  might 
have  been  done  by  Englishmen.  We  are  accus- 

[276] 


GOAKS  AND  HUMOUR 

tomed  to  think  of  our  humour,  at  its  best,  as  a 
quieter  and  wiser  thing,  urbane  and  sympathetic. 
But  Washington  Irving  and  Holmes  are  (sub- 
ject matter  apart)  as  English  as  Lamb,  if  those 
are  our  qualities;  and  many  other  Americans,  in 
some  ways  very  Transatlantic  (O.  Henry  and 
Twain  are  examples),  are  masters  of  the  richer 
and  deeper  humour  as  well  as  of  the  other  sort. 
Bret  Harte's  Condensed  Novels,  again,  might 
have  been  written  by  a  very  restrained  Euro- 
pean parodist.  And  when  Thoreau  said  that 
"  the  profession  of  doing  good  is  full,"  and 
Ambrose  Bierce  defined  a  bottle-nose  as  "  A 
nose  fashioned  in  the  image  of  its  Maker,"  their 
mots  were  in  the  traditional  European  mould. 
There  are,  however,  kinds  of  humour  in  which 
the  Americans  have  specialised;  the  body  of 
American  humorous  literature  is  as  peculiar  as 
it  is  extensive.  We  have  had  practitioners  in 
dialect  and  humorous  bad  spelling;  but  there  is 
a  difference  between  them  and  Josh  Billings, 
Artemus  Ward,  who  invented  the  Goak,  and 
Mr.  Dooley.  We  have  had  humorous  travellers, 
but  they  are  not  like  Mark  Twain.  Where  lies 
the  difference? 

American  humour,  of  the  distinctively  Amer- 
ican sort,  gains  something  from  the  peculiar 
flavour  of  the  American  dialect.  There  was  a 

[277] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

man  who  travelled  in  a  sleeping  car  on  a  rail- 
way. During  the  night  he  was  annoyed  by  ver- 
min, and  he  wrote  to  the  headquarters  of  the 
company  to  complain.  He  received  back  from 
the  administrative  head  a  letter  of  immense 
effusiveness.  Never  before  had  such  a  com- 
plaint been  lodged  against  this  scrupulously 
careful  line,  and  the  management  would  have 
suffered  any  loss  rather  than  cause  annoyance 
to  so  distinguished  a  citizen  as,  etc.,  etc.  He 
was  very  delighted  with  this  abject  apology. 
But  as  he  was  throwing  away  the  envelope  there 
fell  out  a  slip  of  paper,  which  had,  apparently, 
been  enclosed  by  mistake.  On  it  was  a  memo- 
randum: "  Send  this  guy  the  bug-letter."  One 
need  not  explain  how  this  joke  gains  from  the 
peculiarity  of  the  language.  (It  has  incidentally 
another  feature  which  is  traditionally  a  charac- 
teristic of  much  American  humour — namely, 
laconicism.  All  nations  have  their  laconics;  but 
brevity  has  always  been  a  popular  cult  in  the 
U.  S.  A.  A  typical  example  both  of  this  and 
of  an  equally  common  habit  of  allusiveness  is 
the  remark  of  the  Yankee  at  the  Zoo,  who,  for 
the  first  time  in  his  life,  saw  a  giraffe.  He 
looked  at  it  long  and  hard,  and  then  observed: 
"I  don't  believe  it.")  The  language  does  give 
a  tinge  to  American  jests:  and,  naturally,  an 

[278] 


GOAKS  AND  HUMOUR 

even  more  important  element  is  the  sum  of 
American  social  conditions  and  history.  The 
unique  circumstances  of  American  life  are  di- 
rectly responsible  to  some  of  the  striking  things 
about  American  humour. 

A  noticeable  thing  about  American  humour 
— one  doesn't  mean  merely  the  efforts  of  a  few 
prominent  humorists — is  the  range  it  covers. 
Few  things  are  sacred,  and  few  are  too  serious 
to  be  jested  about.  Cutting  loose  from  Europe 
and  all  its  traditions  (the  breach  here  is  rather 
closing  up  than  widening),  and  living  in  a  new 
country,  where  the  normal  life  was  adventurous 
and  changeful,  and  anything  might  turn  up  at 
any  moment,  the  American  developed  a  curious 
detachment.  With  this  came  a  philosophic 
whimsicality,  which  treated  everything  lightly 
and  saw  everything  on  the  comic  plane.  We  in 
Europe  have  all  sorts  of  taboos.  We  are  seri- 
ous about  many  things;  and  if  we  are  serious 
about  a  thing  we  do  not  (unless  we  are  excep- 
tional people)  jest  about  it.  The  normal  Amer- 
ican humorist  jests  about  everything  (however 
strongly  he  may  feel  about  it),  from  his  wife 
downwards.  He  will  even  make  jests  about  mil- 
lionaires, a  thing  which  to  most  Englishmen 
seems  shocking.  If  you  detach  yourself  suffi- 
ciently from  things,  everything  on  earth  will 

[279] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

appear  a  little  comic,  as  indeed  it  is.  This  habit 
of  standing  outside  things  has  been  general  in 
America.  When  Artemus  Ward  wrote  his  let- 
ter to  the  Prince  of  Wales :  "  Friend  Wales — 
You  remember  me.  I  saw  you  in  Canady  a 
few  years  ago.  I  remember  you  too.  I  seldom 
forgit  a  person.  .  .  .  Of  course,  now  you're 
married  you  can  eat  onions,"  he  was  not  merely 
the  Republican  being  familiar  with  the  Royal 
Prince:  he  was  doing  what  he  would  have  done 
to  the  Head  of  his  own  State.  Even  a  Repub- 
lican Englishman  would  probably  have  been 
slightly  shocked  by  such  irreverence.  It  was  an 
American,  again,  who  discovered  that  "  the  cow 
is  an  animal  with  four  legs,  one  at  each  corner." 
As  a  scientific  fact  this,  I  need  scarcely  say,  had 
been  long  known :  but  it  took  a  new  pair  of  eyes 
to  see  it  precisely  in  this  way. 

A  European  of  Mark  Twain's  abilities  and 
position  would  scarcely  have  written  his  book 
about  the  Court  of  King  Arthur.  We  have  too 
many  inhibitions.  They  are  great  and  small. 
But  the  American  habit  of  putting  remarks  in  a 
whimsical,  humorous  form,  whatever  they  are, 
and  whatever  the  occasion,  is  so  widespread  that 
one  often  finds  Americans  of  the  most  sober 
and  humorless  kind  putting  things  humorously 
out  of  sheer  force  of  national  habit.  An  English 

[280] 


GOAKS  AND  HUMOUR 

employee,  giving  his  employer  notice,  will  either 

say  that  he  cannot  stand  this  place  any 

longer  or  else  apologise  in  an  embarrassed  way 
for  causing  inconvenience.  The  American  is 
more  likely  to  come  up  with  a  normal  expression 
and  observe,  "  Say,  Doc,  if  you  know  anybody 
who  wants  my  job,  he  can  have  it."  Everything 
is  susceptible  of  humour;  and  the  more  extrava- 
gant the  humour,  the  better.  American  humour 
is,  strictly  speaking,  pervasive.  The  lecturer 
who  announced  on  his  programme  that  he  was 
"  compelled  to  charge  one  dollar  for  reserved 
seats,  because  oats,  which  two  years  ago  cost  30 
cents  per  bushel,  now  cost  one  dollar;  hay  is  also 
one  dollar  75  cents  per  cwt.,  formerly  50  cents," 
was  carrying  his  systematic  high  spirits  into  a 
place  where  few  British  entertainers  would  have 
thought  of  being  funny.  It  all  springs  from  the 
state  of  mind  which  led,  some  years  ago,  to  the 
formation  of  Smile  Clubs,  institutions  that  no 
other  people  would  have  dreamed  of.  Jocosity 
is  the  best  policy. 

There  is  an  American  story  about  a  man  who 
invented  a  pneumatic  life-saving  device,  to  be 
attached  to  the  body  when  jumping  from  a  win- 
dow during  a  fire.  He  announced  an  exhibition 
test.  He  sprang  from  the  top  of  a  sky-scraper, 
and  then  "  he  bounced  and  bounced  and  bounced 

[281] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

until  we  had  to  shoot  him  to  save  him  from  death 
by  starvation."  There  is  another  about  a  dis- 
pute between  two  fishermen  as  to  the  relative 
size  of  fish  in  their  respective  waters.  Smaller 
fry  having  been  catalogued,  one  man  said  that 
he  once,  when  after  very  large  tarpon,  got  a 
whale:  to  be  met  by  the  blase  repartee,  "  In  my 
State,  sir,  we  bait  with  whales."  And  there  is 
another  (where  it  comes  from,  I  forget),  about 
two  brothers  who  went  out  hunting  with  two 
rifles  and  a  single  bullet,  and  brought  the  bullet 
home  after  killing  a  hundred  head  of  buffalo. 
Their  method  was  this.  They  were  very  crack 
shots,  and  they  used  to  stand  one  on  each  side 
of  the  doomed  beast.  The  bullet  was  fired  by 
one  brother,  went  through  the  victim,  and  was 
received  by  the  muzzle  of  the  other  brother's 
rifle.  An  Englishman,  hearing  these  stories, 
would  know  where  they  had  come  from.  We 
can  appreciate  them,  but  we  do  not  as  a  rule 
make  them.  We  illustrate  the  qualities  of  men 
and  things  by  telling  lies  about  them,  but  we 
do  not  tell  such  thumping  big  ones.  Our  fishing 
stories  are  only  slightly  over  the  borders  of  the 
credible;  a  foolish  person  might  be  taken  in  by 
them :  the  American  ones  are  such  lies  that  nar- 
rators have  no  hope  that  even  the  most  innocent 
will  believe  them.  This  obvious  difference  be* 

[282] 


GOAKS  AND  HUMOUR 

tween  the  usual  American  and  the  usual  Eng- 
lish method  of  treating  a  thing  humorously  may 
be  illustrated  by  examples.  Ten  years  ago,  or 
so,  the  London,  Chatham  and  Dover  Railway 
reached  its  nadir,  and  all  British  humorists  were 
making  jokes  about  the  slowness  of  the  trains. 
Some  of  these  jokes  were,  for  us,  fairly  drastic: 
the  summit  of  achievement  was  reached,  I  think, 
by  a  report  that  a  cow  had  met  its  death  by 
charging  an  L.  C.  D.  express  from  behind,  and 
that  the  directors,  at  an  emergency  meeting, 
had  decided  to  place  cow-catchers  at  the  rear 
end  of  all  trains.  But  try  to  imagine  what 
would  have  been  said  had  the  London,  Chatham 
and  Dover  Railway,  been  in  America.  The  most 
luxuriant  of  our  conceptions  would  have  been 
feeble  compared  with  the  miracles  of  metaphor 
that  would  have  been  coined  to  show  the  ex- 
traordinary slowness  of  those  trains.  In  Ameri- 
can descriptions  they  would  not  have  gone  at  a 
walking  pace,  they  would  not  even  have  crawled 
at  a  snail's:  at  their  fastest  the  snails  would 
have  overtaken  them,  and  mostly  they  would 
positively  have  gone  backwards  so  that  passen- 
gers would  be  compelled,  aiming  at  a  certain 
destination,  to  board  trains  ostensibly  proceed- 
ing in  the  opposite  direction.  Now  I  think  of 
it,  I  do  seem  to  remember  something  about  a 

[283] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

cow  boarding  a  train  and  biting  the  passengers. 
This  delight  in  giving  the  extra  turn  of  the 
screw  that  destroys  the  last  shred  of  verisimili- 
tude for  the  sake  of  a  fantastic  effect  is  to  be 
seen  everywhere  in  American  humorous  writing, 
and  one  may  take  an  illustration  from  the  other 
side  at  random.  Mr.  Stephen  Leacock's  de- 
scription of  how  he  tried  to  borrow  a  match  from 
a  man  in  the  street  will  do.  The  account  throws 
light  on  a  common  experience,  and  the  various 
stages  of  the  man's  struggle  with  his  pockets 
and  production  of  toothpicks  and  other  articles 
from  his  coat-tails  whilst  his  parcels  fall  all 
round,  might  have  been  done  by  an  Englishman. 
But  in  the  end  he  cannot  help  rounding  it  off  by 
a  piece  of  sheer  gusto  that  would  scarcely  have 
occurred  to  anyone  but  an  American.  Full  of 
compassion  at  the  would-be  match-lender's  state 
of  desperation,  the  author  puts  an  end  to  his 
suffering  by  throwing  him  under  a  tram — that 
is  to  say,  a  "  trolley-car."  Mr.  Leacock  hap- 
pens to  be  a  Canadian  and  not  a  citizen  of  the 
United  States.  But  in  this  regard  they  share 
the  same  tastes  and  the  same  habits. 

In  fact,  as  has  been  said  ten  thousand  times 
before,  they  love  Exaggeration.  All  little  Amer- 
ican communities  in  the  old  days  had  Charac- 
ters of  whom  they  were  proud:  and  the  Char- 

[284] 


GOAKS  AND  HUMOUR 

acter  was  almost  always  an  abnormal  Exaggera- 
tor  or  Vituperator — which  comes  to  the  same 
thing.  He  was  a  man  with  a  fine  flow  of  the 
extravagant  or  the  grotesque;  in  other  words, 
a  Champion  Liar.  The  pleasure  that  such 
artists  take  in  their  work  is  the  pleasure  of  the 
fantastic  embroiderer  or  the  mediaeval  carver  of 
gargoyles.  American  essays  in  the  Preposter- 
ous are  of  various  sorts.  Continually  one  gets 
the  monstrously  absurd  simile,  or  the  mild  over- 
statement of  a  single  fact.  All  American  funny 
men  make  a  practice  of  this.  It  usually  becomes 
a  habit  with  them;  they  state  everything  in  this 
form.  Mark  Twain's  ordinary  level  is  typified 
by  "  Twins  amount  to  a  permanent  riot.  And 
there  isn't  any  real  difference  between  triplets 
and  an  insurrection  " — which  is  rather  tired  and 
mechanical. 

O.  Henry,  a  writer  who  is  far  more  than  a 
jester,  was  very  good  in  this  way.  One  may 
quote  from  his  account  of  the  Mayor  who  was 
lying  ill  in  bed,  with  what  seemed  a  grave  stom- 
achic complaint:  "He  was  making  internal 
noises  that  would  have  had  everybody  in  San 
Francisco  hiking  for  the  parks."  I  suppose 
one  is  forced  to  explain,  for  the  benefit  of  the 
forgetful  British  reader,  that  the  population  of 
San  Francisco  lives  in  dread  of  earthquakes. 

[285] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

But  the  more  admirable  kind  of  invention  is  the 
impossibility  upon  a  larger  scale;  the  calculated 
and  nicely-worked  out  mendacity  which,  in  pro- 
portion to  its  gross  incredibility,  is  worked  out 
with  the  highest  attainable  degree  of  simplicity 
and  gravity,  the  frankly  absurd  story  which  is 
told  you  as  the  state  of  the  weather  or  your 
grandmother's  health  might  be  told  you.  In 
the  perfection  of  this  species  we  have,  I  think, 
the  finest  achievement  of  American  humour. 

Max  Adder's  famous  account  of  the  poet  who 
was  engaged  to  write  In  Memoriam  verses  to 
go  in  the  obituary  column  of  the  local  paper 
and  brought  the  mob  of  infuriated  parents  down 
upon  the  editor's  head  is  an  early  approach  to 
this  style.  It  is  monstrously  impossible:  but  it 
is  conducted  with  a  considerable  amount  of  re- 
straint. Later  authors  have  gone  further  in  the 
self-suppression  which  eschews  the  incidental 
auctorial  intervention  or  flamboyance  of  phrase, 
for  the  sake  of  the  whole  story.  Mark  Twain 
frequently  did  this  sort  of  thing  with  great  cir- 
cumspection. For  instance,  the  dialogue  with 
the  Chief  of  detectives  in  The  Stolen  White  Ele- 
phant. The  detective  wants  to  know  what  the 
missing  animal  usually  eats : 

"  '  Now,  what  does  this  elephant  eat,  and  how 
much  ? ' 

[286] 


GOAKS  AND  HUMOUR 

"  '  Well,  as  to  what  he  eats — he  will  eat  any- 
thing. He  will  eat  a  man,  he  will  eat  a  Bible- 
he  will  eat  anything  between  a  man  and  a  Bible.' 

"  '  Good — very  good  indeed,  but  too  general. 
Details  are  necessary — details  are  the  only  valu- 
able things  in  our  trade.  Very  well — as  to  men. 
At  one  meal! — or,  if  you  prefer,  during  one 
day — how  many  men  will  he  eat,  if  fresh? ' 

"  '  He  would  not  care  whether  they  were  fresh 
or  not;  at  a  single  meal  he  would  eat  five  ordi- 
nary men.' 

"'Very  good;  five  men;  we  will  put  that 
down.  What  nationalities  would  he  prefer? ' 

"  '  He  is  indifferent  about  nationalities.  He 
prefers  acquaintances,  but  is  not  prejudiced 
against  strangers.' 

"  '  Very  good.  Now  as  to  Bibles.  How  many 
Bibles  would  he  eat  at  a  meal? ' 

"  *  He  would  eat  an  entire  edition.' 

" '  It  is  hardly  succinct  enough.  Do  you 
mean  the  ordinary  octavo,  or  the  family  illus- 
trated?' 

"  '  I  think  he  would  be  indifferent  to  illustra- 
tions; that  is,  I  think,  he  would  not  value  illus- 
trations above  simple  letter-press.' 

"  *  No,  you  do  not  get  my  idea.  I  refer  to 
bulk.  The  ordinary  octavo  Bible  weighs  about 
two  pounds  and  a  half,  while  the  great  quarto 

[287] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

with  the  illustrations  weighs  ten  or  twelve.  How 
many  Dore  Bibles  would  he  eat  at  a  meal  ? ' 

*  If  you  knew  this  elephant,  you  could  not 
ask.    He  would  take  what  they  had.' 

'  Well,  put  it  in  dollars  and  cents,  then. 
We  must  get  at  it  somehow.  The  Dore  costs 
a  hundred  dollars  a  copy,  Russian  leather,  bev- 
elled/ 

'  He  would  require  about  fifty  thousand  dol- 
lars' worth — say  an  edition  of  five  hundred 
copies.' 

*  Now  that  is  more  exact.     I  will  put  that 
down.    Very  well;  he  likes  men  and  Bibles;  so 
far,  so  good.'  ..." 

That  is  businesslike;  that  is  sober  realism. 
Given  the  leading  idea  everything  is  related  with 
complete  propriety.  The  elaboration  of  it  was 
clearly  a  labour  of  love  to  its  author. 

A  more  modern  instance  is  Mr.  Ellis  Parker 
Butler's  Pigs  is  Pigs,  a  short  story  which  may 
or  may  not  have  been  published  in  this  country. 
A  pair  of  guinea-pigs  are  transported  from  one 
town  to  another  by  an  Express  Delivery  Com- 
pany. An  obstinate  official  insists  in  charging 
thirty  cents  a  head  on  them,  the  rate  for  pigs; 
an  equally  obstinate  consignee  refuses  to  pay 
more  than  the  twenty-five  cents  due  on  pets. 


GOAKS  AND  HUMOUR 

Pending  agreement  the  guinea-pigs  are  left  in 
the  office.  The  man-in-charge  writes  to  head- 
quarters about  it,  and  causes  great  bewilder- 
ment by  mentioning  two  animals  in  his  first 
letter,  eight  in  his  second,  and  32  in  his  third. 
The  struggle  continues  (an  enormous  bill  for 
cabbage-leaves  being  run  up)  until  the  office 
is  one  large  range  of  hutches  and  the  guinea- 
pigs  number  very  many  thousands.  The  man 
has  only  to  step  (or  rather  creep,  for  there  is 
little  space)  into  the  street  for  five  minutes, 
and  on  his  return  he  finds  that  there  are  a  hun- 
dred more.  This  story  is  told  with  perfect 
composure:  there  is  only  one  joke  in  it,  and 
that  is  the  whole  story.  The  effect  of  this  kind 
of  thing  is  the  effect  of  parody.  It  is  parody  of 
life  and  close  to  the  humour  of  Butler's  Ere- 
whon.  No  one  can  equal  the  American  humorist 
at  it.  The  Americans — I  use  the  word  in  the 
most  complimentary  sense — are  the  greatest 
liars  in  Creation. 

Professor  Leacock,  in  his  essay  upon  Ameri- 
can Humour,  says :  "  Essays  upon  American 
Humour  after  an  initial  effort  towards  the  dig- 
nity and  serenity  of  literary  criticism,  generally 
resolve  themselves  into  the  mere  narration  of 
American  jokes  and  stories.  The  fun  of  these 
runs  thinly  towards  its  impotent  conclusion,  till 

[289] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

the  disillusioned  reader  detects  behind  the  mask 
of  the  literary  theorist  the  anxious  grin  of  the 
secondhand  story-teller."  How  untrue  that  is; 
and  how  unfair. 

In  order  to  get  back  on  him  for  his  gratui- 
tous malice,  I  shall  steal  from  his  Literary 
Lapses  a  final  example  of  his  great  gift  of  mak- 
ing an  idiot  of  himself.  He  sets  himself  to 
consider  whether  or  not  the  bicycle  is  a  nobler 
animal  than  the  horse. 

"  I  find  that  the  difference  between  the  horse 
and  the  bicycle  is  greater  than  I  had  supposed. 

"  The  horse  is  entirely  covered  with  hair ;  the 
bicycle  is  not  entirely  covered  with  hair,  ex- 
cept the  '89  model  they  are  using  in  Idaho. 

"  In  riding  a  horse  the  performer  finds  that 
the  pedals  in  which  he  puts  his  feet  will  not 
allow  of  a  good  circular  stroke.  He  will  ob- 
serve, however,  that  there  is  a  saddle  in  which — 
especially  while  the  horse  is  trotting — he  is  ex- 
pected to  seat  himself  from  time  to  time.  But 
it  is  simpler  to  ride  standing  up  with  the  feet 
in  the  pedals. 

"  There  are  no  handles  to  a  horse,  but  the 
1910  model  has  a  string  to  each  side  of  its  face 
for  turning  its  head  when  there  is  anything  you 
want  it  to  see. 
[290] 


GOAKS  AND  HUMOUR 

"  Coasting  on  a  good  horse  is   superb,  but 
should  be  under  control." 

I  should  like  to  hear  Professor  Freud's  views 
on  the  hidden  implications  of  this. 


[291] 


A  CORNER  OF  OLD  ENGLAND 

IT*  has  been  maintained  that  war  is  indispen- 
sable because  it  teaches  people  geography.  I 
will  not  discuss  the  merits  or  the  defects  of  that 
doctrine  here,  and  I  freely  admit  that  in  August, 
1914,  I  knew  nothing  of  the  situation  of  Brest- 
Litovsk  or  Bourlon  Wood.  But  the  illumina- 
tion of  war  is  only  local,  and,  since  I  have  to 
mention  the  Southern  Appalachians,  I  had  bet- 
ter explain  what  they  are.  They  are  a  range 
of  mountains,  or,  rather,  an  extensive  mountain 
district  running  from  the  Pennsylvania  border, 
through  the  Virginias,  Kentucky,  the  Carolinas, 
and  Tennessee  into  the  northern  parts  of  Geor- 
gia and  Alabama.  Here  Mrs.  O.  D.  Campbell 
and  Mr.  Cecil  Sharp  (to  whom  we  owe  the 
recovery  of  many  of  our  old  country  songs) 
have  been  hunting  for  English  Folk  Songs.  The 
results  of  their  explorations  are  published  by 
Messrs.  Putnam;  the  book  is  a  romance. 

The  Southern  Appalachian  region  is  a  large 
one,  larger  than  Great  Britain.  Mr.  Sharp  has, 
therefore,  covered  as  yet  no  more  than  small 
[292] 


A  CORNER  OF  OLD  ENGLAND 

portions  of  it,  chiefly  in  the  "  Laurel  Country  " 
of  North  Carolina.  In  that  region  he  had  expe- 
riences which,  to  an  imaginative  man,  must  have 
been  as  thrilling  as  anything  that  has  ever  hap- 
pened to  an  explorer  in  Central  Africa  or  Bor- 
neo. It  is  mountainous,  thickly  wooded,  and 
very  secluded.  There  are  few  roads,  except 
mountain  tracks;  and  scarcely  any  railroads. 
"  Indeed,  so  remote  and  shut  off  from  outside 
influence  were,  until  quite  recently,  these  se- 
questered mountain  valleys  that  the  inhabitants 
have  for  a  hundred  years  or  more  been  com- 
pletely isolated  and  cut  off  from  all  traffic  with 
the  rest  of  the  world."  I  suppose  this  is  a  slight 
exaggeration:  that,  for  instance,  these  Arca- 
dians, however  fortunately  sequestered,  imported 
doctors,  clothes,  and  tools.  But  one  knows  what 
Mr.  Sharp  means.  Coming  into  their  midst  the 
travellers  found  themselves  in  a  "  pocket  "  of  an 
old  England  v/hich  has  disappeared.  They  found 
a  strong,  spare  race;  leisurely;  easy  and  unaf- 
fected in  their  bearing,  and  with  "  the  unself- 
conscious  manners  of  the  well-bred."  They  are 
mostly  illiterate,  and  each  family  grows  just 
what  is  needed  to  support  life;  but  they  are 
contented,  quick-witted,  and,  in  the  truest  sense, 
civilised.  Their  ancestors  came,  apparently, 
from  the  north  of  England;  their  religion  is 

[293] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Calvinistic.  Generations  of  freedom  in  America 
have  undoubtedly  modified  some  of  their  orig- 
inal characteristics.  They  drink  and  smoke  very 
little  and  "  commercial  competition  and  social 
rivalries  are  unknown."  But  though  in  some 
regards  they  have  customs  peculiar  to  them- 
selves, in  others  they  are  more  faithful  transmit- 
ters of  old  English  tradition  than  are  the  Eng- 
lish to-day: 

"  Their  speech  is  English,  not  American,  and, 
from  the  number  of  expressions  they  use  which 
have  long  been  obsolete  elsewhere  and  the  old- 
fashioned  way  in  which  they  pronounce  many 
of  their  words,  it  is  clear  that  they  are  talking 
the  language  of  a  past  day,  though  exactly  of 
what  period  I  am  not  competent  to  decide." 

In  that  antique  tongue  they  sing  the  old  songs 
that  their  ancestors  brought  over  from  England 
in  the  time  of  George  III.  and  perhaps  still 
earlier.  Here  in  England  the  folk-song  col- 
lector always  has  to  make  straight  for  the  Oldest 
Inhabitant.  The  young  know  few  of  the  old 
songs,  being  supplied  with  music-hall  songs  from 
London  and  Berlin  and  rag-times  from  New 
York.  In  the  Appalachians,  where  cosmopoli- 
tan music  is  unknown,  the  folk-song  tradition 

[294] 


A  CORNER  OF  OLD  ENGLAND 

is  as  strong  in  the  young  as  in  the  aged,  and  Mr. 
Sharp  has,  on  occasion,  drawn  what  he  wanted 
from  small  boys.  There,  in  log-huts  and  farm- 
steads, hundreds  of  miles  west  of  the  Atlantic 
coast,  on  uplands  lying  between  Philadelphia 
and  St.  Louis,  he  found  this  people  strayed  from 
the  eighteenth  century  using  such  phrases  as 
"  But  surely  you  will  tarry  with  us  for  the 
night,"  and  singing,  with  a  total  unconscious- 
ness both  of  themselves  and  of  their  auditors, 
of  woods  and  bowers,  milk  white  steeds  and  dap- 
ple greys,  lily-white  hands,  silver  cups,  the 
Northern  Sea,  London  Bridge,  and  the  gallows. 
He  heard  from  these  mountain  singers  The 
Golden  Vanity,  The  Cherry  Tree  Carol,  Lord 
Randal,  The  Wife  of  Usher's  Well,  Lady  Isa- 
bel and  the  Elf  Knight,  and  scores  of  less  well 
known  ballads  and  songs,  versions  of  which  the 
collectors  have  for  years  been  painfully  picking 
up  in  Sussex,  Somersetshire,  Yorkshire,  and 
Cornwall.  It  is  a  strange  reflection  that,  had 
we  left  it  a  little  later,  we  might  have  had  to  go 
to  America  for  old  folk  music  which  had  been 
totally  lost  on  English  soil. 

Mr.  Sharp  does  not  make  it  quite  clear  which 
of  his  songs  are  hitherto  altogether  unrecorded; 
he  includes  several  ballads  not  in  Child's  collec- 
tion, but  Child  may  have  deliberately  rejected 

[295] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

them  and  they  may  have  appeared  elsewhere. 
Remarkably,  he  got  no  ritual  songs,  songs  asso- 
ciated with  harvest  home,  morris  and  sword 
dances,  or  the  coming  of  English  spring  and  the 
primroses.  His  hundred  and  twenty-two  texts 
include  only  one  carol  and  few  songs  touching 
on  religion.  The  English  rituals  were  not  trans- 
planted; the  festivals  died  out;  the  doctrines  of 
the  mountaineers  deprecated  dancing;  and  the 
spring  of  their  new  country  was  not  the  spring 
of  their  old.  They  are  strongest  in  ballads,  and 
in  songs  (like  Shooting  of  His  Dear)  with  sto- 
ries in  them,  which  things  lose  nothing  by  trans- 
plantation across  a  hemisphere;  and  the  songs 
are  still  living  in  the  old  way,  growing  and 
changing  with  the  whims  and  memories  of  indi- 
vidual singers,  yet  always  retaining  the  essential 
kernel.  Nearly  all  the  tunes  are  in  "  gapped 
scales,"  scales  with  only  five  or  six  notes  to  the 
octave;  as  always  with  folk  songs  they  are  pre- 
dominantly melancholy,  and  many  of  them  are 
exceedingly  beautiful. 

That  Mr.  Sharp's  texts — or  indeed  those 
of  folk  songs  as  a  whole — are  in  the  bulk  great 
poetry  I  will  not  maintain.  At  its  least  polished 
the  folk  song  sinks  to  the  level  of  this  (sung  by 
Mrs.  Tom  Rice,  at  Big  Laurel,  West  Caro- 
lina) : 

[296] 


A  CORNER  OF  OLD  ENGLAND 

They  hadn't  been  laying  in  bed  but  one  hour 
When  he  heard  the  trumpet  sound. 
She  cried  out  with  a  thrilling  cry: 
O  Lord,  O  Lord,  I'm  ruined. 

This,  possibly,  is  a  corruption  of  something 
originally  a  little  more  rounded;  a  process  simi- 
lar to  that  which  works  upon  all  folk  songs 
and  which  (in  the  Appalachian  versions  of  The 
Golden  Vanity)  gives  the  name  of  that  good 
ship  variously  as  the  Weeping  Willow  Tree  and 
the  Golden  Willow  Tree,  and  provides  a  sister 
ship  with  the  names  of  Golden  Silveree  and 
Turkey  Silveree,  which  might  strike  even  an 
Appalachian  as  an  odd  name  for  a  vessel.  We 
do  not  know  in  folk  songs,  as  a  rule,  what  is 
"original"  and  what  is  not;  usually  there  has 
been  so  much  accretion  that  there  can  hardly  be 
said  to  be  an  "  original "  at  all.  The  process  is 
not  productive  of  great  verse,  comparable  with 
the  masterpieces  of  form  produced  by  poets  with 
surnames,  fountain-pens  and  identifiable  tomb- 
stones, though  often  there  is  a  poignancy  about 
individual  lines  and  stanzas  which  makes  them 
very  effective  even  when  divorced  from  their  ex- 
quisite tunes,  which  are  the  real  triumphs  of 
folk-production.  Mr.  Sharp's  American  collec- 
tion is  certainly  not,  textually,  superior  to  the 
English  collections.  But  it  does  contain  some 

[297] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

fine  things.  It  must  have  been  queer  to  listen 
to  The  True  Lover's  Farewell  coming  from  the 
lips  of  a  woman  in  the  American  backwoods : 

O  fare  you  well  my  own  true  love, 
So  fare  you  well  for  a  while, 
I'm  going  away,  but  I'm  coming  back 
If  I  go  ten  thousand  mile. 

If  I  prove  false  to  you,  my  love, 

The  earth  may  melt  and  burn, 

The  sea  may  freeze  and  the  earth  may  burn 

If  I  no  more  return. 

Ten  thousand  miles,  my  own  true  love, 
Ten  thousand  miles  or  more ; 
The  rocks  may  melt  and  the  sea  may  burn 
If  I  never  no  more  return. 

And  who  will  shoe  your  pretty  little  feet, 
Or  who  will  glove  your  hand, 
Or  who  will  kiss  your  red  rosy  cheek 
While  I'm  in  the  foreign  land? 

My  father  will  shoe  my  pretty  little  feet, 
My  mother  will  glove  my  hand, 
And  you  can  kiss  my  red  rosy  cheek 
When  you  return  again. 

O  don't  you  see  yon  little  turtle  dove, 
A-skipping  from  vine  to  vine 
A-mourning  the  loss  of  its  own  true  love 
Just  as  I  mourn  for  mine? 

[298] 


A  CORNER  OF  OLD  ENGLAND 

Don't  you  see  yon  pretty  girl 
A-spinning  on  yonder  wheel? 
Ten  thousand  gay,  gold  guineas  would  I  give 
To  feel  just  like  she  feels. 

The  end  lets  one  down  with  a  jerk;  but  the 
construction  is  perfect. 


[299] 


A  POET'S  PEDIGREE 

MY  eye  was  caught  by  a  controversy  in  the 
Saturday  Westminster.  A  reviewer  had  "  char- 
acterised "  as  "  a  misleading  statement "  some- 
body's allegation  that  the  poet  Shelley  "  came 
of  an  ancient  county  family."  It  is  the  com- 
monest of  observations  that  it  was  the  strangest 
thing  in  the  world  that  so  imaginative,  phan- 
tasmal, revolutionary  a  being  as  Shelley  should 
have  sprung  from  "  a  line  of  heavy  country 
squires."  Commentators  always  assume  that 
the  inheritor  from  such  ancestors  should  live  up 
to  Charles  Churchill's  description  of  "  some 
tenth  transmitter  of  a  foolish  face."  There  was 
nothing  surprising,  therefore,  in  the  fact  that 
an  indignant  correspondent  wrote  in  to  dispute 
what  the  reviewer  had  said  and  to  question  his 
authority.  The  critic  answered  by  referring  his 
antagonist  to  John  Addington  Symonds's  book 
on  Shelley.  It  is  there  stated  that  Sir  Bysshe 
Shelley,  the  poet's  grandfather,  "  was  born  in 
North  America  and  began  life,  as  it  is  said,  as 
a  quack  doctor."  "Began  life,"  is  not  a  very 
[300] 


A  POET'S  PEDIGREE 

good  way  of  putting  it;  one  is  reminded  of  the 
frequent  merchant  prince  who  has  "  come  into 
the  world  without  a  penny  in  his  pocket."  But 
the  meaning  is  clear,  and  Symonds  goes  on  to 
say  that  Sir  Bysshe  was  an  adventurer  who 
"  succeeded  in  winning  the  hands  and  fortunes 
of  two  English  heiresses."  So  the  reviewer, 
whilst  prepared  to  admit  that  the  American 
Shelleys  were  members  of  the  Sussex  family, 
sticks  to  what  is  material  in  his  point. 

The  ancient  and  illustrious  ancestry  of  the 
Sussex  Shelleys  is  not  a  matter  of  dispute.  A 
person  of  their  name,  or  something  near  enough 
to  it  to  entitle — or,  at  least,  to  encourage — a 
family  claim,  came  over  with  that  well-attended 
man  the  Conqueror  and  appears  on  the  Roll  of 
Battle  Abbey.  Another  Sir  Guy  on  de  Shelley 
was  a  Crusader,  and  a  Crusader  of  the  first 
water.  He  it  was  who  adopted  the  family  coat. 
He  hung  three  great  conches  or  shells  behind 
his  shield.  Each  of  these  had  miraculous  prop- 
erties. A  blast  blown  on  one  scattered  foes  like 
chaff;  the  sound  of  another  would  drive  away 
the  devil;  and  the  third  was  reputed  to  have  the 
power  of  compelling  any  woman  to  succumb  to 
Sir  Guyon's  charms.  How  this  is  known  is  not 
clear,  for  we  are  told  that  he  was  far  too  up- 
right a  man  ever  to  use  it.  And  it  is  to  be 

[301] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

presumed  that  he  exercised  a  similar  self-con- 
trol with  regard  to  the  others;  or,  thus  muni- 
tioned, he  would  certainly  have  gone  farther  in 
the  world  than  he  did.  If  it  be  contended  that 
there  is  something  mythical  about  Sir  Guy  on, 
who  might  have  been  the  original  of  Sir  Huon 
of  Bordeaux,  no  such  question  can  arise  about 
the  sixteenth-century  Sir  R.  Shelley,  who  was 
Grand  Prior  of  the  Knights  of  Malta.  His 
descendant,  Sir  John  Shelley,  of  Maresfield, 
was  a  baronet  of  the  original  1611  creation.  It 
will  be  remembered  that  James  I.,  who  wanted 
money,  invited  and  even  compelled  men  of  sub- 
stance to  become  baronets  for  <£lOOO  apiece, 
thus  affording  modern  practitioners  an  ancient 
precedent.  This  man  had  two  sons — Sir  Wil- 
liam, a  judge  of  Common  Pleas,  and  Edward. 
From  Edward  sprang  Timothy,  who,  as  Medwin 
says,  "  had  two  sons,  and  settled — having  mar- 
ried an  American  lady — at  Christ's  Church, 
Newark,  in  North  America;  where  Bysshe  was 
born,  on  the  21st  June,  1731."  This  Bysshe 
was  Sir  Bysshe,  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley's  grand- 
father. 

We  may  presume  that  the  pedigree — which 

Mr.  Buxton  Forman  gives — is  sound,  though 

there  is  often  some  doubt  about  pedigrees  which 

have  an  American  break  in  them.    But  there  is 

[302] 


A  POET'S  PEDIGREE 

no  doubt  that  if  it  be  supposed  that  a  "  freak  " 
like  Shelley  ought  to  have  some  unusual  ancestor 
to  inherit  from  Sir  Bysshe  is  quite  good  enough. 
There  is  no  need  to  go  to  so  recent  an  authority 
as  Symonds;  for  he  and  other  modern  writers 
go  back  to  the  foolish  but  racy  Medwin  for  their 
authority.  The  transatlantic  Bysshe,  says  Med- 
win, "  exercised  the  profession  of  a  quack  doc- 
tor and  married,  it  is  said,  the  widow  of  a  miller, 
but  for  this  I  cannot  vouch."  Dowden,  who 
likes  to  tone  down  anything  derogatory,  even 
about  Shelley's  grandfather,  refers  to  "  rumours 
of  some  dim  American  bride,"  but  says  that 
Bysshe  "  must  have  made  haste  in  wooing  and 
wedding  and  burying  his  transatlantic  wife,  if 
ever  she  had  existence,"  for  he  was  not  more 
than  twenty-one  when  he  married  his  second 
wife.  But  as  the  poet  himself  definitely  states 
in  a  letter  of  1812  that  his  grandfather  "  acted 
very  ill  to  three  wives,"  we  may  reasonably  take 
it  that  the  miller's  widow  existed,  "in  some 
shape  or  other." 

Before  he  was  twenty-one,  Bysshe  Shelley 
had  renounced  quackery,  buried  (we  must  as- 
sume) his  American  wife,  come  to  England, 
and,  in  Medwin's  words,  "  captivated  the  great 
heiress  of  Horsham,  the  only  daughter  and  heir- 
ess of  the  Rev.  Theobald  Michell."  Her  guar- 

[303] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

dian  forbade  the  marriage,  so  the  couple  eloped 
and  "  were  wedded  in  that  convenient  asylum 
for  lovers,  the  Fleet,  by  the  Fleet  parson." 
Having  borne  him  three  children  (including 
Timothy,  the  poet's  father),  this  wife  died, 
within  a  few  years,  of  smallpox.  Medwin's 
possibly  prejudiced  account  of  the  sequel  be- 
gins :  "  After  his  wife's  death,  an  insatiate  for- 
tune-hunter, he  laid  siege  to  a  second  heiress  in 
an  adjoining  county.  In  order  to  become  ac- 
quainted with  her,  he  took  up  his  abode  for  some 
time  in  a  small  inn  on  the  verge  of  the  Park  at 
Penshurst."  The  lady  was  Miss  Sidney  Pery, 
and  again  there  was  an  elopement;  it  suggests 
that  he  had  at  least  a  great  superficial  fascina- 
tion and  that  he  had  not  been  a  quack  doctor 
for  nothing.  Late  in  life,  Bysshe  Shelley  was 
given  a  baronetcy  in  order  that  his  electioneer- 
ing interest  might  be  secured  for  the  Whigs. 
He  became  a  great  miser,  and  "  his  manner  " 
(Medwin  again)  "of  life  was  most  eccentric, 
for  he  used  to  frequent  daily  the  tap-room  of 
one  of  the  low  inns  at  Horsham,  and  there  drank 
with  some  of  the  lowest  citizens,  a  habit  he  had 
probably  acquired  in  the  New  World."  His  life 
was  very  prolonged,  and  his  son  is  alleged  to 
have  obtained  daily  bulletins  of  his  health, 
though  we  may  doubt  this.  Two  of  his  daugh- 

[304] 


A  POET'S  PEDIGREE 

ters  eloped  as  he  had  done,  and  he  cut  them  out 
of  his  will.  The  good  Professor  Dowden's  allu- 
sions to  him  are  very  taking.  He  calls  him  "  a 
gentleman  of  the  old  school,  with  a  dash  "  [my 
italics]  "  of  New  World  cleverness,  push,  and 
mammon- worship."  "  Stately  old  Sir  Bysshe," 
proceeds  the  professor,  "  impressed  the  towns- 
folk as  melancholy;  perhaps,  said  they,  he  was 
'  crossed  in  love  '  in  his  youth."  Sir  Bysshe  may 
have  been  libelled  by  Medwin,  but  it  is  absurd 
to  be  sentimental  about  him.  Dowden,  sum- 
marising his  achievements,  says  that  "  he  achieved 
greatness  by  bold  and  dexterous  strokes."  Bold 
and  dexterous,  indeed! 

This,  as  Froude  said  of  the  Saint,  is  "  all  and 
more  than  all,  that  is  known "  of  Shelley's 
American  grandfather.  It  may  fairly  be  argued 
by  those  who  attach  importance  to  such  mat- 
ters, that,  whatever  the  ultimate  descent  in  the 
male  line  may  be,  the  statement  that  Shelley 
sprang  from  a  line  of  Sussex  squires  requires 
qualification,  as  it  were,  both  in  spirit  and  in 
matter.  For  most  of  us,  we  are  not  greatly  dis- 
turbed by  such  questions.  We  let  the  genealo- 
gists, and  the  biologists,  and  the  sociologists 
arouse  themselves  with  them,  but  we  should  be 
quite  as  prepared  to  see  Shelley  springing  from 
a  line  of  greengrocers  as  from  a  line  of  bucca- 

[305] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

neers.  What  porridge  had  John  Keats?  why 
that  lapse  into  classicism  on  the  part  of  a  livery- 
stable  keeper's  son?  Where  did  Blake  get  his 
wildness  from;  where  did  William  Morris  get 
his ;  whence  came  the  volcanic  turbulence  of  Mr. 
Alfred  Noyes?  Not,  as  far  as  I  know,  from 
father  or  grandfather.  Genius  appears  any- 
where, and  we  should  have  no  sound  reason  for 
surprise  had  Shelley  sprung,  as  an  eminent,  but 
too  precise,  modern  is  said  to  have  done,  from 
"  a  long  line  of  maiden  aunts." 

On  the  other  hand,  if  we  must  look  for  un- 
usual people  in  an  unusual  man's  pedigree, 
whose  pedigree — and  remember  both  female  and 
male  descents  count  in  this  matter — is  free  from 
them?  It  is  always  assumed  in  such  arguments 
that  any  kind  of  "  unusualness  "  will  do.  Mad- 
ness and  genius  are  allied;  and  so,  argue  the 
school  of  Rougon-Macquart,  are  artistic  power, 
boldness  in  swindling,  excess  in  vice.  Which  of 
us,  if  he  goes  back  a  few  generations  on  both 
sides,  cannot  find  an  ancestor  sufficiently  eccen- 
tric or  sufficiently  degenerate  to  serve  quite  ade- 
quately as  an  ancestor  for  Shakespeare  himself? 


[306] 


RABELAIS 

IT  is  observed  by  Rabelais  himself  that  those 
who  have  read  "  the  pleasant  titles  of  some 
books  of  our  invention,"  such  as  Pease  and  Ba- 
con with  a  Commentary,  "  are  too  ready  to 
judge  that  there  is  nothing  in  them  but  jests, 
mockeries,  lascivious  discourse,  and  recreative 
lies";  but  "the  subject  thereof  is  not  so  foolish 
as  by  the  title  at  the  first  sight  it  should  appear 
to  be."  Were  one  not  faced  with  incitements 
to  speculation  about  meaning  on  every  page, 
this  would  be  sufficient  excuse  for  the  commen- 
tators and  explorers.  But  these  gentlemen 
would  do  well  to  remember  a  later  remark  of 
the  author's  about  "  a  certain  gulligut  friar  and 
true  bacon-picker  "  who  tried  to  get  incredible 
allegories  out  of  Ovid: 

"  If  you  give  no  credit  thereto,  why  do  not 
you  the  same  in  these  jovial  new  chronicles  of 
mine?  Albeit  when  I  did  dictate  them,  I 
thought  upon  no  more  than  you,  who  possibly 
were  drinking  the  whilst  as  I  was.  For  in  the 

[307] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

composing  of  this  lordly  book,  I  never  lost  nor 
bestowed  any  more,  nor  any  other  time  than 
what  was  appointed  to  serve  me  for  taking  of 
my  bodily  refection,  that  is,  whilst  I  was  eating 
and  drinking.  And  indeed,  that  is  the  fittest 
and  most  proper  hour  wherein  to  write  these 
high  matters  and  deep  sciences;  as  Homer  knew 
very  well,  the  paragon  of  all  philologues,  and 
Ennius,  the  father  of  the  Latin  poets,  as  Hor- 
ace calls  him,  although  a  certain  sneaking  job- 
bernol  alleged  that  his  verses  smelled  more  of 
the  wine  than  oil." 

An  accusation  which  Rabelais  calls  "  an  honour 
and  a  praise." 

Our  ancestors  tended  to  regard  Rabelais  as 
purely  a  buffoon.  Their  imaginary  portraits 
of  him  were  much  like  their  portraits  of  Fal- 
staff.  Modern  research  has  recovered  a  good 
many  details  of  his  industrious  life,  and  shown 
how  vast  is  the  learning  and  how  purposeful 
much  of  the  satire  of  his  great  book.  It  has 
even  been  decided  that  the  only  portrait  with 
the  slightest  claim  to  authenticity  is  one  which 
gives  him  weary  eyes,  sunken  cheeks,  a  wispy 
beard,  and  a  forehead  like  a  ploughed  field. 
Some  of  the  results  of  the  immense  mass  of 
modern  French  investigation  are  tabulated  in 

[308] 


RABELAIS 

Mr.  W.  F.  Smith's  Rabelais  in  His  Writings, 
published  by  the  Cambridge  University  Press, 
and  Mr.  Smith  makes  a  good  many  conjectures 
of  his  own.  Among  his  arguments  some  are 
not  exactly  conclusive.  It  is  not  very  satisfy- 
ing to  be  told  that  Rabelais  was  not,  as  used 
to  be  supposed,  born  in  1483;  he  was  always 
exact  about  facts,  and  we  can  (we  are  told) 
deduce  with  certainty  from  his  own  writings 
that  he  was  born  in  1494,  "  about  1494  or  1495," 
or  else  in  1489.  It  is  not  much  use  to  know 
that  his  statements  of  facts  were  accurate  when 
you  don't  know  which  were  his  statements  of 
facts.  But  his  history  has  been  very  much  am- 
plified; we  know  where  he  went  and  when  he 
wrote  much  better  than  we  did;  and  the  nature 
of  his  reading  and  references  is  being  gradually 
cleared  up.  In  one  regard,  at  least,  the  tendency 
of  modern  students  is  significant.  When  re- 
search on  him  began,  the  inclination  was  to  read 
great  affairs  into  his  every  chapter.  It  is  now 
certain  that  the  war  between  Grandgousier  and 
Picrochole  represents  nothing  more  than  a  law- 
suit between  Rabelais'  father  (who  is  no  longer 
alleged  to  have  been  an  innkeeper  as  the  robust 
old  tradition  had  it)  and  a  neighbouring  land- 
lord over  riparian  rights.  But  the  point  to 
remember  (in  the  light  of  the  introduction  to 

[309] 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

Gargantua,  if  our  own  sense  doesn't  guide  us) 
is  that  the  raw  material  of  Rabelais  ceases  to  be 
important  after  he  has  used  it.  He  may  have 
amused  himself  as  much  as  he  liked  by  using 
real  characters,  incidents,  and  events  in  his  nar- 
rative, but  the  fairy-tale  he  made  out  of  them  is 
the  thing  that  matters.  The  war  between  those 
two  kings  was  not  written  merely  in  order  to 
record  this  insignificant  law-suit;  when  Friar 
John  of  the  Funnels,  "  by  his  prowess  and  valour 
discomfited  all  those  of  the  army  that  entered 
into  the  close  of  the  abbey,  unto  the  number  of 
thirteen  thousand,  six  hundred,  twenty  and  two, 
besides  the  women  and  little  children,  which  is 
always  to  be  understood,"  Rabelais  had  forgot- 
ten all  about  the  fishing  rights  of  Rabelais  pere 
and  was  merely  thinking  of  his  own  amusement 
anl  perhaps  of  the  grinning  faces  of  his 
hospital  patients,  for  whose  amusement  the 
first  two  books  are  alleged  to  have  been 
written. 

The  scholars  must  not,  in  fact,  begin  to  make 
him  smell  more  of  the  oil  than  of  the  wine., 
They  have  demonstrated  that  he  was  not  a 
drunkard — though  anyone  with  half  an  eye 
could  see  that;  but  they  now  tend  to  suggest 
rather  that  he  was  a  teetotaler.  They  prove 
that  he  was  an  eminent  physician,  a  successful 


RABELAIS 

lecturer,  a  trusted  diplomatist,  an  erudite  theo- 
logian, a  great  Humanist,  a  Church  reformer,  a 
linguist,  a  lawyer,  a  traveller,  an  expert  in 
architecture  and  the  military  art,  and  Lord 
knows  what  else;  and  they  almost  lose  sight  of 
the  fact  that,  whatever  else  he  was,  he  was  a 
jolly  old  dog.  Here,  for  instance,  is  Mr.  Smith, 
who  has  patience,  judgment,  learning,  and  who 
certainly  would  not  be  spending  his  life  upon 
such  an  author  if  he  did  not  relish  him.  Yet 
his  book  is  completely  humourless,  lacking  in 
high  spirits  or  even  relish,  and  unilluminated 
even  by  the  quotations  from  the  text  which 
might  give  balance  to  it.  One  cannot  help 
thinking  that  if  the  spirit  of  Rabelais  himself, 
looking  down  from  the  clouds  over  the  lid  of  a 
tankard  of  nectar,  should  descry  these  books  on 
the  work  which  he  dedicated  with  a  "  Ho !  Ye 
most  illustrious  drinkers,"  he  would  be  tempted 
to  add  a  few  more  items  to  that  long  catalogue 
of  imaginary  pedantry  with  which  he  filled  his 
Library  of  St.  Victor,  and  which  includes 
Quaestio  subtilissima,  utrum  chimaera  in  vacuo 
bombinans  possit  comedere  secundas  intentiones, 
and  Marmotretus  de  baboonis  et  apis,  cum  Com- 
mento  Dorbellis. 

In  fact,  after  I  had  read  Mr.  Smith's  book- 
closely  reasoned,  carefully  arranged,  clearly  ex- 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

pressed,  as  it  is — I  had  to  go  back  to  Rabelais 
and  read  a  few  remembered  passages  in  order 
to  remind  myself  that  neither  reform  nor  auto- 
biographical history  were  his  prime  interest.  I 
read  of  that  storm  during  which  Panurge,  as 
white  as  chalk,  chattered,  "  Be,  be,  be,  bous, 
bous,  bous."  I  read  the  debate  on  Marrying  or 
not  Marrying,  and  the  Discourse  of  the  Drink- 
ers, the  finest  reproduction  of  the  chatter  of  a 
crowd  enjoying  themselves  which  exists  any- 
where in  literature.  I  read  the  great  formal 
address  wherewith  Master  Janotus  de  Brag- 
mardo  besought  Gargantua  to  return  to  the 
people  of  Paris  the  bells  of  Our  Lady's  Church 
which  he  had  carried  off  on  the  neck  of  his 
mare,  and  which  opens: 

"  Hem,  hem,  gud-day,  sire,  gud-day.  Et  vo- 
bis,  my  masters.  It  were  but  reason  that  you 
should  restore  to  us  our  bells ;  for  we  have  great 
need  of  them.  Hem,  hem,  aihfuhash.  We  have 
oftentimes  heretofore  refused  good  money  for 
them  of  those  of  London  in  Cahors,  yea,  and 
those  of  Bordeaux  in  Brie,  who  would  have 
bought  them  for  the  substantific  quality  of  the 
elementary  complexion,  which  is  intronificated 
on  the  terrestreity  of  their  quidditative  nature, 
to  extraneize  the  blasting  mists  and  whirlwinds 


RABELAIS 

upon  our  vines,  indeed  not  ours,  but  these  round 
about  us." 

And  I  read  that  most  perfect  chapter  of  all 
"  of  the  qualities  and  conditions  of  Panurge," 
who  "  was  of  a  middle  stature,  not  too  high  nor 
too  low,  and  had  somewhat  of  an  aquiline  nose, 
made  like  the  handle  of  a  razor,"  who  was  "  nat- 
urally subject  to  a  kind  of  disease  which  at  that 
time  they  called  lack  of  money,"  and  who  "  was 
a  wicked,  lewd  rogue,  a  cozener,  drinker,  roister, 
rover,  and  a  very  dissolute  and  debauched  fel- 
low, if  there  were  any  in  Paris;  otherwise,  and 
in  all  matters  else,  the  best  and  most  virtuous 
man  in  the  world."  And,  having  thus  read,  I 
felt  sure  again  that  although  it  is  interesting  to 
know  that  the  idea  of  Panurge  came  out  of  an 
Italian  macaronic  romance,  and  probably  out 
of  fifty-seven  other  places  as  well,  it  really  does 
not  greatly  matter;  any  more  than  that  "fair 
great  book  "  which  Panurge  wrote,  but  which 
"  is  not  printed  yet  that  I  know  of." 

Still,  it  is  ridiculous  not  to  be  thankful  for 
the  book  one  will  use.  This  is  especially  so  when, 
in  England,  Rabelaisian  literature  is  so  scarce. 
No  English  biographer  has  thought  it  worth 
while  to  write  a  really  big  book  on  him;  and 
beyond  Professor  Saintsbury  (who  had  a  mag- 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

nificent  chapter  on  him  in  his  recent  History  of 
the  French  Novel)  and  two  industrious  Cam- 
bridge dons,  scarcely  any  living  English  critic 
has  attempted  to  do  him  justice.  He  is  not  even 
widely  read;  except  by  schoolboys  who  get  hold 
of  nasty  paper-covered  editions  of  him  because 
he  was  in  the  habit  of  plastering  his  pages  with 
unpleasant,  and,  in  print,  unusual  words.  He 
cannot  be  excused — as  some  have  attempted  to 
excuse  him — from  the  charge  of  a  verbal  coarse- 
ness unparalleled  in  any  other  great  modern 
writer.  But  his  gigantic  humour,  his  inexhaus- 
tibly happy  language,  his  knowledge  of  man- 
kind, his  wisdom,  and  the  generosity  of  his 
spirit,  have  made  him  the  secular  Bible  of  a  suc- 
cession of  English  writers  (amongst  whom,  a 
little  surprisingly,  was  Charles  Kingsley),  and 
there  are  many  men  living  who  would  find  him 
equally  companionable  if  only  they  would  once 
try  him.  They  need  not  even  bother  about  read- 
ing him  in  the  original.  For  the  seventeenth 
century  translation  by  Sir  Thomas  Urquhart  of 
Cromartie  (concluded,  not  quite  so  superbly,  by 
Peter  Motteux)  is  one  of  the  great  translations 
of  the  world,  unequalled  by  any  other  transla- 
tion in  our  language,  a  miracle  in  its  constant 
re-creation  of  what  cannot  be  literally  rendered 
from  the  French  into  our  own  tongue. 

[SHI 


FAME  AFTER  DEATH 

I  HAVE  been  reading  an  author  unduly  neg- 
lected. There  are  many.  Our  literature  is  full 
of  minor  classics  which  from  time  to  time  are 
galvanised  into  life  by  new  editions,  and  then 
relapse  into  almost  complete  oblivion,  a  few 
bookish  people  cherishing  them  and  no  one  else 
mentioning  them.  These  resent  the  neglect. 
They  feel  that  injustice  is  being  done  if  a  fa- 
vourite book  is  omitted  from  histories  of  litera- 
ture or  is  unknown  to  people  who  would  appre- 
ciate it.  And  there  is  no  doubt  that  the  injus- 
tice is  felt  as  an  injustice  to  the  author  person- 
ally, though  he  be  long  dead  and  unaware  of 
men's  speech  and  their  silence.  This  feeling 
springs  unconsciously,  perhaps,  from  the  knowl- 
edge that  if  a  man  writes  a  good  book  one  of 
his  main  motives,  almost  always,  is  posthumous 
fame.  He  wishes  his  name  and  his  personality 
to  survive  him;  posterity  must  think  well  of 
him;  it  must  know  that  a  man  lived  who  was 
fully  up  to  its  own  best  standards,  a  man  intel- 
lectually as  acute,  emotionally  as  quick,  mor- 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

ally  as  sound  as  the  latest  births  of  time.  "  I 
think,"  said  the  dying  Keats,  "that  I  shall  be 
among  the  English  poets  after  I  die  " ;  "  Not 
marble,  nor  the  gilded  monuments  of  princes," 
wrote  Shakespeare,  "  shall  outlast  this  powerful 
rhyme."  The  predictions  indicate  the  prepos- 
sessions. We  still  see  through  their  eyes  and 
feel  with  their  hearts,  find  ourselves  in  them 
and  them  in  ourselves.  But  posthumous  fame  is 
not  always  of  this  quality;  and  the  neglect  we 
spoke  of  is  not  the  only  kind  of  neglect. 

For,  thinking  of  those  authors  whose  names 
are  kept  but  dimly  and  intermittently  alive,  of 
those  books  (not  of  the  first  order)  in  the  sur- 
vival or  revival  of  which  chance  seems  so  nota- 
bly to  operate,  I  thought  of  those  whose  names 
survive  detached  from  their  works,  or  of  whom 
the  names  are  universally  respected  whilst  the 
works  are  generally  ignored.  There  are  Anglo- 
Saxon  poets,  Caedmon  and  Cynewulf,  whose 
names  come  easy  to  the  lips  of  all  literate  men; 
but  who  reads  them  save  an  occasional  editor 
and  an  infrequent  examinee?  Langland,  of 
Piers  Plowman,  is  another  such.  He  is  uni- 
versally regarded  as  our  greatest  writer  before 
Chaucer,  but  how  many  times  a  year  does  any- 
body open  his  book,  and  how  many  of  those  who 
would  never  omit  him  from  any  list  of  the 


FAME  AFTER  DEATH 

illustrious  dead,  are  in  contact  with  him  or  have 
any  first-hand  basis  for  their  belief  in  his  great- 
ness? Writing  of  Chaucer's  successors,  the  late 
Churton  Collins,  a  candid  if  a  narrow  man,  re- 
marked that  "  What  Voltaire  said  of  Dante  is 
literally  true  of  such  poets  as  Henryson,  Doug- 
las, and  Dunbar.  We  simply  take  them  on 
trust."  And  there  are  a  great  many  others 
whom  most  of  us  take  on  trust.  It  would  be 
foolish  to  suggest  that  no  one  ever  reads  the 
Faerie  Queen  through,  and  we  know  that  from 
time  to  time  Spenser,  the  great  artist,  has  pro- 
foundly affected  the  art  of  his  successors.  But 
what  proportion  of  those  who  put  him  amongst 
the  four  greatest  of  our  poets  habitually  read  his 
masterpiece,  or,  in  fact,  have  ever  read  it  at  all? 
How  many  who  mechanically  do  reverence  to 
his  name  are  secretly  of  opinion  that  his  works 
are  extremely  dull?  Is  he  read  in  England 
any  more  than  Confucius  is?  And  in  some  de- 
gree does  not  this  divorce  between  fame  and 
familiarity,  the  existence  of  established  and  un- 
challenged reputation  which  is  also  mainly  un- 
tested, affect  also  such  great  figures  as  Ben 
Jonson,  Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  and  Dryden, 
and  such  lesser  ones  as  Richardson  and  Jeremy 
Taylor?  They  are  labelled;  they  have,  after 
whatever  early  vicissitudes,  been  put  on  their 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

respective  shelves,  and  scholars  provide  the  gen- 
eral public  with  the  facts  about  them  and  the 
justifications  for  their  position.  But  Spenser 
does  not  live  as  Shelley  lives,  nor  Dryden  as 
Jane  Austen.  The  range  of  their  personal  ac- 
cess is  far  narrower  than  that  of  their  celebrity. 
In  the  farthest  extremity,  there  survive  from 
classical  times  illustrious  names  to  which  no 
works  are  attached  at  all;  they  are  spoken  of 
with  respect;  they  must  not  be  missed  out  on 
any  account;  but  we  know  nothing  of  the  men 
beyond  their  names.  And  this,  which  is  an  un- 
common occurrence  in  the  sphere  of  literature, 
is  in  other  spheres  common;  for  our  dim  and 
inchoate  early  records  have  handed  down  to  us 
the  names  of  thousands  of  monarchs  and  war- 
riors who  meant  to  leave  their  marks  on  the 
world,  whose  names  do  reverberate  through  the 
ages,  and  of  whom  we  know  nothing  more. 
What  was  Sennacherib  like?  What,  beyond 
their  names,  did  Hengist  and  Horsa  leave  be- 
hind them?  And,  dreaming  of  that  posthumous 
life  which  is  so  usual  a  human  ambition,  would 
they  have  been  satisfied  to  know  that  they  would 
survive  only  in  a  mere  verbal  repetition  of  the 
names  they  bore? 

Probably  they  would  have  preferred  that  to 
nothing.    This  passion  is  beyond  reason.    Rea- 


FAME  AFTER  DEATH 

son  tells  us  that  time  is  long  and  eternity  longer, 
that  all  civilisations  pass,  and  that  in  the  end  all 
records  fade.  We  cannot,  looking  ahead,  visual- 
ise millions  of  years  of  accumulated  reputations. 
Old  fames  must  die  as  new  fames  grow,  and 
accident  may  wipe  them  out  with  more  than 
normal  rapidity.  :'  What  poets  sang  in  Atlan- 
tis ?  "  asks  a  modern  poet.  We  know  what  they 
must  have  felt,  but  we  do  not  know  who  they 
were;  and  the  tidal  wave  that  suddenly  sub- 
merged that  fabled  continent  is  but  a  violent 
and  abrupt  symbol  of  the  decay  and  oblivion 
that  ultimately  must  overcome  all  the  works  of 
men.  We  may  be  established  as  we  think.  We 
may  at  last  have  driven  firm  piles  in  that 
morass  into  which  past  civilisations  have  con- 
stantly relapsed.  The  last  of  the  barbarian  in- 
vasions may  be  over;  our  scientific  fabric  may 
not,  within  thinkable  time,  collapse;  the  ordered 
progress  of  the  Victorian  vision  may  be  ahead 
and  may  last  through  aeons.  But  even  so — and 
it  is  a  large  postulate — the  vessel's  wake  cannot 
indefinitely  be  kept  in  sight.  There  will  be  a 
horizon  to  each  age,  beyond  which  the  knowl- 
edge and  interest  of  details  far  behind  will  fade. 
They  will  have  new  Shakespeares  and  new 
Spensers;  our  sonnets  will  have  gone  like  our 
marble  and  the  gilded  monuments  of  our  princes, 


LIFE  AND  LETTERS 

beyond  the  range  even  of  archaeologists.  And 
in  the  end  what  prospect  does  reason,  working 
on  the  supposed  facts  that  are  now  provided 
her,  offer?  A  cooling  and  a  disappearance.  A 
void  and  frozen  world  circling  in  space,  and  a 
watching  moon  that  has  outlasted  all  mortal 
fames  and  seen  the  ultimate  Shakespeare  pass 
and  die,  leaving  no  more  permanent  trace  than 
Hodge  at  his  plough  or  the  slaves  that  worked 
on  the  pyramids.  We  know  all  that,  yet  know- 
ing it  makes  no  difference.  For  fame  after 
death,  however  uncertain  and  however  perish- 
able, men  will  work,  starve,  and  bear  with  cheer- 
fulness the  neglect  of  their  contemporaries;  in 
the  last  resort  they  are  content  that  for  some 
term,  the  limits  of  which  they  shrink  from  con- 
templating, the  mere  syllables  of  their  names 
should  be  known  and  spoken,  like  the  names  of 
schoolboys  cut  on  desks  or  the  initials  of  lovers 
on  trees.  Is  it  strange  that  the  meditative,  con- 
templating so  peculiar  a  phenomenon,  should 
have  found  in  this  mania,  otherwise  so  stupid 
and  perverse,  the  inexplicable  reflection  of  a 
deep  consciousness  of  immortality? 


THE  END 


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